Far-Right Election Groups Are Now Targeting Nursing Homes

With just weeks to go until the midterms, election denial groups have found a new target: nursing homes.The groups, led by the right-wing Election Integrity Network, have claimed without evidence that left-wing organizations are perpetrating voter fraud inside nursing homes, care homes, and assisted-living facilities. The network is now recruiting their followers to contact and question those facilities.“These left-wing groups go into the nursing homes, and they go into the group homes, and they basically steal the votes of these most vulnerable,” Cleta Mitchell, the Election Integrity Network’s founder, said in a recent appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room show.As evidence, Mitchell referenced a case in Wisconsin from 2020 in which a sheriff alleged that eight residents in a care home had their votes filled out for them. The Wisconsin Election Commission rejected the claims. Mitchell told Bannon the case could have cost president Donald Trump the 2020 election, though that wouldn’t be possible: Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by over 20,000 votes.Mitchell’s group has been urging followers to download a toolkit from the Election Integrity Network website and email and call nursing homes in their area. The group has also created multiple images for followers to share on social media which reinforce the idea of widespread voter fraud at nursing homes.In one campaign, the network shared a series of posts that mapped residential care facilities in competitive congressional districts in states including Arizona, California, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The posts identified “vulnerable residents” who “may become targets for political predators seeking easy access to ballots.”Mitchell and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to requests for comment.The effort is part of a much broader push by election deniers to undermine trust in the midterms. And just like the claims of noncitizen voting and widespread mail-in voter fraud, they have been supercharged by the Trump administration.In July, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a memo that removed previous guidance on how staff at nursing homes could help residents to vote, such as assisting with mail-in voting or transporting residents to polling locations. The new memo replaced that guidance with threats of prosecution if staff “engage in inappropriate coercion or other violations of residents’ rights.”The memo also claimed that the agency has “become aware of several allegations of instances in which resident rights were unlawfully violated.” However, the examples cited in the memo did not lead to any proven cases of voter fraud. CMS did not respond to a request for comment.In August, senators led by Elizabeth Warren and Alex Padilla slammed the changes, writing in a letter to CMS that rather than protecting the country’s 2 million nursing home residents, the new rules would disenfranchise them.“CMS issued a memo that appears to be an attempt to intimidate nursing home staff from assisting residents in the voting process,” the senators wrote in the letter, addressed to CMS administrator Mehmet Oz (who himself has flip-flopped on whether the 2020 election was rigged).But now, with less than a month to go before the midterms, groups like the Election Integrity Network—which has close ties to the White House—are pushing the narrative that nursing homes are a hive of vote rigging activity.Another election denial group, the New York–based Project Civicia, has launched a similar campaign, entitled “Adopt a Care Facility.” The group told WIRED that it could not share how many people were taking part in the campaign but repeated the claims made by CMS about voter fraud in Wisconsin, in addition to other allegations.“We do not presume wrongdoing by a facility because its residents need voting assistance,” Kim Hermance, cofounder and president of Project Civica, tells WIRED. “There are other public cases of forged absentee applications and similar problems. Separately, in our own review of New York records, we noticed people over 85 who appeared to register and vote for the first time shortly before an election. That is not illegal by itself, but it raised a basic question about how facilities handle the process.”