From ‘Smurfing’ to ‘Granny Farming’: Report Exposes 50+ Election Integrity Threats Before 2026 Midterms

There are more than 50 threats to election integrity in the United States ahead of the 2026 midterms, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Institute (GAI). GAI released its biennial “Top 50 Election Threats” report ahead of election day on November 3, detailing vulnerabilities in five major areas of election security, which spans from noncitizen voting and ballot handling, to other insidious schemes like “smurfing” and “granny farming.” The GAI report supports each threat with documented examples and proposed solutions to bolster United States election safeguards. “America’s elections face threats from every direction – foreign adversaries, political operatives, dark money, and government officials who refuse to enforce the rules,” GAI president Peter Schweizer said in a statement. “This report exposes more than fifty documented vulnerabilities.” “None of these threats are hypothetical – each one is documented, and most can be fixed if officials are willing to enforce the laws already on the books,” added GAI’s top voter fraud investigator and vice president, Eric Eggers. The five areas the report focuses on are noncitizen voting, ballot handling, partisan lawfare, political financing, and emerging technological and foreign threats. One of the most urgent focuses of the report is illegal noncitizen voting. While some states are cracking down and closing loopholes, others are encouraging — and even legalizing — illegal immigrants voting. “A recent undercover investigation found that two Iranian nationals were registered to vote in Michigan. In New Jersey, approximately 6,600 self-identified noncitizens were registered to vote between 2023 and 2024. A recent Census Bureau report linked more than 24,000 voters in the 2020 election alone to noncitizen status with high confidence,” the GAI report details. “DHS has separately identified 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections nationwide, a conservative estimate drawn only from public records and ten cooperating states’ voluntary data.” (Government Accountability Institute) The report points to permissive state policies, like Minnesota’s “vouching” systems, which allows unidentified individuals to cast ballots without ever showing ID, and California’s laws shielding noncitizens from prosecution if they are caught registering to vote. “The result of such policies is predictable. Weak voter ID laws, dirty voter rolls, and political operatives working to maximize turnout while disregarding election security, have opened the floodgates for noncitizen voting. All the while, accountability is evaded,” the GAI report reads. The report pointed out that, as of 2026, 22 local governments in the United States let noncitizens vote, and only 18 have strong state constitutional language explicitly barring noncitizen voting. Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia will vote on November 3 whether to join those states in passing a law changing their state constitutions to say that only citizens may vote. Noncitizen voting laws (Government Accountability Institute) GAI additionally found that only 36 states require any former of ID to vote, and only 24 states require photo ID. “A loophole in Wisconsin’s voter ID law let nearly 150,000 voters registered as ‘indefinitely confined’ receive absentee ballots in 2024 without showing a qualifying photo ID,” GAI provided as an example in the report. “Voters can claim the status by simply checking a box that claims their age, illness, or disability confines them to their homes, with no proof required and no one checking.” The GAI report also warns that more than half of states refuse free federal checks of their voter rolls. The organization noted that while states resist voter roll audits and data sharing in the name of privacy concerns, they eagerly hand voting data over to nonprofit groups like ERIC and Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). Both groups can be traced back to David Becker, “PEW’s director of election initiatives and a former director of the George Soros funded People for the American Way,” the report reads. “The organization was supposed to be the fix for the inaccurate voter roll problem. Instead, states have accused ERIC of acting as a partisan operation to drive voter-registration at scale without verifying citizenship status,” the report says. The GAI report argues that most threats to United States elections could be mitigated by enforcing existing laws or tightening them. GAI also calls on the Senate to vote on the SAVE America Act as a standalone bill; the legislation would require proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote. The House has passed the Trump-backed bill several times, but the bill has never successfully made it through the GOP-majority U.S. Senate. GAI further contends that while states have a right to govern their own elections, every state should be compelled to cooperate with federal voter-roll audits to ensure Americans’ votes are protected and the right to vote is not extended to noncitizens. Government Accountability Institute The 69-page report delves into other sinister schemes that undermine American elections, such as “granny farming.” “Granny farming” is term for ballot harvesting aimed at the elderly — when bad actors fill out ballots for residents of nursing homes and care centers, often without their knowledge or informed consent. There have been recent cases of “granny farming” out of Michigan and Texas, the report details. In Michigan, Trenae Myesha Rainey was sentenced to prison time in 2022 for forging elderly residents’ signatures on absentee ballot applications at the nursing home where she worked at in Macomb County. The GAI report additionally works to unravel dark money and political funding platforms that convolute and influence United States elections: Dark money does more than buy political advertisements. It has financed an enormous parallel infrastructure built around American elections. This infrastructure includes operations centered on voter registration, voter turnout, ballot initiatives, election litigation, and political campaigns to rewrite voting rules. The money frequently travels through multiple nonprofit intermediaries before reaching the organization doing the work, obscuring how concentrated the funding really is. GAI’s review of nonprofit filings through 2024 found major election organizations receiving tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars from overlapping leftist donor machines, including those within the Arabella funding network, George Soros’ affiliated nonprofits, the Tides funding network, and other left-leaning tech oligarchs from Silicon Valley. GAI cited the example of America Votes, an organization that sent Nevada “social pressure” mailers claiming to track voter participation in the 2022 elections. According to the GAI, more than $300 million flowed to that group from just two networks through 2024, including $252.4 million from Arabella-network entities and $51.5 million from nonprofits with the Soros funding network. Another one of the 50-plus election integrity threats the United States faces is called “smurfing,” which GAI defines as “breaking one large donation into many small ones under different names to dodge contribution limits and disclosure, often to launder illegal foreign money.” “Smurfing” has made recent headlines in relation to an investigation opened by 19 Republican attorneys general into ActBlue, an online fundraising platform and PAC that supports Democrat candidates. “FEC records attribute more than 16,000 ActBlue donations totaling nearly $150,000 to an 88-year-old Michigan woman between 2020 and 2026. The woman disputes ever donating anywhere close to that amount,” the GAI report details. “Private investigators in Wisconsin identified similar discrepancies, including an Appleton man disputing $93,168 across 7,878 donations and a Sister Bay playwright with nearly $20,000 in contributions attributed to his name, despite claiming he never made a political donation,” GAI continues. “A Republican strategist also discovered small-dollar donations to Bernie Sanders had been made in his name without his knowledge, using the alias ‘Bernie Kane.”‘ The report continues: Inconsistencies go beyond individual complaints. FEC records examined by independent researchers attribute tens of thousands of small-dollar donations to single individuals, sometimes under multiple variations of their names. A Fort Collins, Colorado woman was found to have 57,138 ActBlue contributions attributed to her under five different name variations, totaling $234,441 over six years and two months, an average of $4.10 per donation. A Florida resident purportedly made 52,591 ActBlue contributions under 14 different aliases over three years and one month, totaling $387,720.207. In California, a resident is listed as having made 52,501 separate contributions under nine aliases over nearly six years, totaling $884,152. “These records raise questions on whether political funding platforms like ActBlue can reliably distinguish legitimate recurring donations from contributions made using another person’s identity, and whether they are taking adequate steps to prevent potential campaign finance fraud,” the report reads. GAI is also sounding the alarm on foreign threats to American elections, including from China and Mexico, which keep close relationships with U.S.-based get-out-the-vote groups and attack voting infrastructure digitally through hacking, as well as threats from emerging technology, such as AI chatbots. “The problem isn’t one bad actor or one broken election law,” GAI’s executive director of research Seamus Bruner said in a statement. “It’s a system riddled with vulnerabilities that powerful interests can exploit. Our investigation identifies more than fifty threats – and shows exactly where the safeguards are failing.” Read the full report HERE. Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.