At the center of the operation is Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative activist and lawyer who advised Trump on how to block the certification of the 2020 election results. After Trump left office, Mitchell started the Election Integrity Network. For the past three years, it has recruited volunteers to hunt for voter fraud and to research the personal backgrounds of state and local election officials to determine whether, according to a training manual, they are “friend or foe.”
Earlier this month, a chapter of the network led by a county election official in Georgia held a Zoom call to make preparations for November. The state’s election board, which is controlled by Trumpists, had recently changed the rules to allow any county officials to halt certification on the basis of undefined concerns about voting irregularities; last week, the Georgia attorney general’s office rebuked the board after it voted to require a manual count of every ballot cast on Election Day. On the call, participants discussed how poll monitors could try to challenge voters if they, say, spoke shaky English or came with a utility bill as proof of their address. “People are going to have to be pains in the ass,” a former Trump Administration official named John Zadrozny said, according to a leaked recording of the call. “You’ve got to be creative without breaking the law.”
All these actions may help lay the groundwork to potentially dispute the certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6th. The big lie of a stolen election is predicated on the smaller one that non-citizens are voting. Neither can be ignored.