Voting Rights Legislation Framed to Support Election Conspiracy Theories About Non-citizens Voting

Written By Michael Grass

  • Misinformed and misleading narratives about non-citizens voting in U.S. elections are a prevalent theme in 2022. These narratives may feature prominently in the upcoming midterm elections.

  • Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) researchers examined online discourse around two situations earlier this year — New York City’s law allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections and the U.S. Department of Justice’s challenge of an Arizona state law — to gauge the current level and nature of non-citizen voting conspiracism in current election discourse.

  • Among prominent themes we identified: Neutral and fact-based reporting around these events was reframed as proof of election delegitimization. Stories were interpreted and reframed to cast doubt on both past and future elections. Theories of non-citizen voting are not new, but rather echo older narratives. Much of the framing appeared to openly embrace rhetoric similar to “Replacement Theory” rhetoric of White supremacist culture.

  • From this examination, we offer recommendations for voters, election administrators and workers, journalists, and social media platforms trying to make sense of these narratives.

Above (from left): New York City Hall in Lower Manhattan and the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix. (Photos by Joseph / Flickr via CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 and David Grant / Flickr via CC BY-NC 2.0)

This Election Integrity Partnership analysis was co-authored by Stephen Prochaska, Kayla Duskin, Sarah Nguyễn, Zarine Kharazian, Joseph S. Schafer Kate Starbird, and Mike Caulfield (University of Washington Center for an Informed Public).

Introduction

In this analysis the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) examines two events: a debate about non-citizen participation in municipal elections in New York City, and a news event around the U.S. Department of Justice’s objection to a place of birth question on an Arizona registration form. These events have been leveraged by political elites, influencers, and online audiences as support for election-related conspiracy theories — especially the false allegation that Democrats are rigging national elections by allowing non-citizens to vote. Although there is legitimate discussion to be had about limits on the rights of non-citizens to vote, the case studies we examine below — which echo broader “replacement” rhetoric — include conspiracy theories implying that border protections are intentionally being weakened to bring in more voters, primarily to bolster or replace an existing voting base. The conspiracy theories that the EIP surfaces in this article suggest that misinformed and misleading narratives about non-citizen voting are a prevalent theme in 2022. These narratives may feature prominently in upcoming midterm elections.

Conspiracy theories around immigrant and non-citizen voting have a long history, and in the past have been a prominent feature of election rumor. As just one example, for several decades in the U.S. Southwest, racist rumors have swirled of mysterious white vans that ferry supposed undocumented immigrants from polling place to polling place on election day (St. John, 2021). In 2016, many of these conspiracy theories, embraced by Donald Trump or propelled by the first wave of Facebook “fake news,” went mainstream. For example, a story about the white vans, spread by the now-defunct site Last Line of Defense (LastLineofDefense.org, 2016), went viral on Facebook, accumulating a then-impressive 367k engagements and taking the 21st spot on Buzzfeed News’ analysis of the top 50 fake news stories of that year (Silverman, 2016). After the 2020 election, President Trump claimed to have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” (Trump, 2016) a claim that had roots in a vague Twitter claim (Phillips, 2016) that was amplified by sites such as InfoWars.

While it’s not possible to do direct comparisons between 2016 and 2020 in terms of prevalence, we did not find non-citizen voter narratives to be central in the misinformation the Election Integrity Partnership collected and analyzed in 2020 (Election Integrity Partnership, 2021) In our list of misinformation stories from 2020 (Kennedy et al., 2022), ranked by engagement, the first story on wrongfully registering non-citizens (in Texas) appears at the 178th spot. Far more dominant in those 2020 collections were the narratives most would recognize as 2020 fixations: mail-in ballots, voting machines, Sharpie pens, and “dead voters.” A few larger stories pegged out-of-state or out-of-town voters as a source of fraud, but did not predominantly tie this to “illegal” immigrants. Perhaps most tellingly, the “white vans” of conspiracy theory made an appearance in the 2020 election discourse, but instead of being said to carry undocumented immigrants from poll to poll, they were said to carry counterfeit ballots (Swenson, 2020), smuggled in the back door of Detroit’s TCF Center, where votes from Wayne County were being counted. 

With a new election in a different national context, we looked at online discourse around two recent events to gauge the current level and nature of non-citizen voting conspiracism in current election discourse. The two events were different in some ways, but turned out to be similar in important aspects. Looking at these events we found that:

  1. Conspiracy theorizing about non-citizen voting was common in the Twitter discourse around these stories, forming a significant portion of the online discussion around these events. 

  2. Conspiracy theorizing around non-citizen voting had significant involvement from partisan media and political elites.

  3. Such theories emerged predictably after news stories about issues of legitimate public debate around non-citizen rights and voter verification, forming a significant conspiracism-engaged band in the larger discourse which appeared to be unchecked by moderation.

Prominent Themes

The first event (hereafter “NYC Event”) involved New York City’s “Our City, Our Vote” law which allowed legal permanent residents and those with work authorization to participate in local elections. The law was passed by the New York City Council on December 19, 2021, became law on January 8, 2022, and was struck down by a Staten Island trial court on June 27, 2022, for violating New York’s State Constitution after Republican Party leaders filed a lawsuit challenging the law. The city is currently appealing the court’s decision. Our analysis focuses on the news and discourse “event” that took place  around the bill becoming law on January 8th and the subsequent lawsuit filed by Republican Party leaders. 

The second event (hereafter “AZ DOJ Event”) arose out of a lawsuit filed on July 5, 2022, by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) challenging an Arizona Law which requires proof of citizenship to participate in federal elections instead of the attestation of citizenship currently required by federal law. For this event, we examined online reactions to the lawsuit as well as what rhetorical similarities exist between the two events. 

When we refer to “event” in this writeup, we refer to an informational event that is catalyzed by an offline event (i.e., “Our City, Our Vote” becoming law or the filing of the DOJ lawsuit), including media coverage of the offline event as well as digital conversation surrounding the offline event and its resulting media coverage.

Although both events revolve around non-citizen voting, they involved slightly different elements of the conversation. For the NYC law, voting rights would have been extended to non-citizens in local elections only. The Arizona law challenged by the DOJ, on the other hand, raised the burden of proof (i.e., providing proof of citizenship) for voting in federal elections beyond that required by federal law — but no attempt was made by the DOJ to allow non-citizen voting. Despite these differences, both events were interpreted and recontextualized online to imply that they would impact federal elections through non-citizen voting. In analyzing rhetoric surrounding these events on Twitter, we find the following patterns in how these stories were incorporated into election misinformation narratives:

  • Neutral and fact-based reporting was reframed as proof of election delegitimization: Previously primed online audiences often reframed factual events and reporting as evidence of a larger, unfounded, conspiracy theory, primarily revolving around Democrats intentionally weakening border protections in order to bring in immigrants unauthorized to be in the U.S. who the Democrats would then try to give the right to vote.

  • Stories were interpreted and reframed to cast doubt on both past and future elections: In the conversation surrounding the DOJ lawsuit against Arizona, the story was linked explicitly to the 2020 election and the continuing false narrative of the stolen election. In addition, claims that Democrats were rigging future elections were spread using this story as evidence. 

  • Theories of non-citizen voting are not new, but rather echo older narratives: The NYC voter law and DOJ lawsuit offered new motivation for theorizing around non-citizen voting, but the conspiracies surrounding the events are not new. Unsubstantiated claims about this topic have returned repeatedly over time, including in tweets collected by the EIP during the 2020 election.

  • Much of the framing appeared to openly embrace rhetoric similar to “Replacement Theory” rhetoric of White supremacist culture. “Replacement Theory” asserts that there is an organized political and social effort (Brauder, 2022) to reduce the influence of White people, and asserts that (AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 2022) there is “a group of powerful people in this country who are trying to permanently alter the culture and voting strength of native-born Americans by bringing in large groups of immigrants,” reducing the “economic, political, and cultural influence” of White people.

History of Non-citizen Voting

Eligibility to vote by non-citizens existed in different forms during the first 150 years of U.S. national history, peaking around 1875 when it was legal in 22 states. By the 20th century, the U.S. started to receive a large influx of immigrants and nativist sentiments increased. This increase coincided with the gradual repeal of immigrant voting rights. (Jiminez et al., 2014) In the mid-1990s through 2003, the issue of non-citizen voting reappeared in the New York State Legislature in the form of several proposals, although no laws were passed. Between 1968-2003, non-citizens were permitted to vote in New York City school board elections as a result of “ambiguous language in key articles of the state education law” (Jiminez et al., 2014). It is important to note that the majority of proposals and previously existing laws in New York focused on the right to vote in local elections, not federal elections.

Currently, other communities across the U.S. have restored non-citizen voting rights. Towns in Maryland and Vermont have given some local voting rights to non-citizens. Non-citizens in San Francisco, California can vote in school board elections. Five Massachusetts towns have passed legislation in favor of immigrant voting rights. Internationally, there are more than 45 countries which give rights for immigrant residents to vote (Jiminez et al., 2014).

Data and Methods

To understand the content and themes of discussions around non-citizen voting, it is helpful to look to social media. Here, we look to Twitter due to the public nature of conversations and the prevalence of activity surrounding the events we examined. Our team applied a grounded (Charmaz, 2014), interpretative, mixed-method approach for understanding how misleading content related to non-citizen voting was seeded and spread — similar to previous research in crisis informatics (Palen & Anderson, 2016) as well as the study of online rumors (Maddock et al., 2015) and online disinformation (Starbird et al., 2019)

We analyzed conversations on Twitter surrounding two events related to non-citizen voting, the NYC Event and the AZ DOJ Event. We collected tweets for the NYC Event between January 7, 2022, and January 16, 2022, using keywords that were iteratively tested and tailored to identify tweets related to the event but that also did not introduce a large number of unrelated tweets. The final set of keywords relied on terms like “New York” and “Our City, Our Vote” co-occurring with terms related to non-citizen voting, including “noncitizen,” “immigrant,” “border,” “foreign,” and “vote” among others, and resulted in a dataset consisting of 75,548 tweets.

A similar process was used to collect tweets related to the AZ DOJ Event, except instead of terms related to New York we used terms related to the Department of Justice and Arizona (e.g., “DOJ” and “AZ”). We collected tweets related to the AZ DOJ Event between July 5, 2022, and July 12, 2022, resulting in a dataset consisting of 93,021 tweets.

After establishing each dataset on Twitter, we generated temporal visualizations and network graphs for each incident to better understand each event. In order to disentangle the different themes present in each conversation, the 100 most retweeted tweets for each event were coded and grouped into the themes present in each visualization below. Additionally, three researchers coded random samples of 100 tweets for each incident to provide an estimate as to the approximate prevalence of conspiracy theorizing present in each event. 

Lastly, we extracted the top external domains linked to in tweets in each event. By examining the most spread domains in each event we were able to better understand outlets and websites that were influential in conversations. 

Case 1: New York City Non-citizen Municipal Voting Law: ‘Our City, Our Vote’

What is Intro 1867?

In January 2020, legislation to expand municipal voting rights, known as Intro 1867-2020, was introduced in the New York City Council. This legislation was intended to allow residents of New York City to participate in municipal elections for local officials (i.e., City Council Members, Mayor, Public Advocate, Borough Presidents, and Comptroller, and ballot initiatives). Eligible individuals must have been a resident of New York City for at least 30 days, such as legal permanent residents and those with work authorizations, and they must qualify to register and vote under New York State election law (New York City Council, 2022). Importantly, the legislation does not apply to state or federal elections (Mays, 2022).

What happened with Intro 1867 (Local Law 11) in NYC?

In December 2021, New York City Council passed the voting measure to include permanent legal residents and those with work authorization forms to participate in voting for NYC offices (i.e., mayor, City Council, and municipal elections) beginning in January 2023. In June 2022, State Supreme Court Justice Ralph J. Porzio (in New York, the Court of Appeals is the state’s highest court, while “Supreme Court” is the trial-level court of general jurisdiction) ruled that the measure violates constitutional guidelines and state law. He suggested that a full referendum is required in order to give non-citizens the right to vote because, while the State Constitution specifies the right that citizens can vote, it does not explicitly exclude non-citizens with the right to vote nor does it specify that only citizens can vote (Mays, 2022).

When the measure was passed, New York City became the largest U.S. municipality to grant voting rights to non-citizens, stirring opposing claims that the opportunities which the measure provides will conversely diminish the voting power of citizens and the potential to prevent non-citizens from seeking to gain citizenship. New York’s mayor at the time, Bill de Blasio, questioned whether the City Council had constitutional power to grant voting rights to non-citizens prior to city council passing the bill. He opted not to sign the bill into law during the final weeks of his term. De Blasio’s successor, Mayor Eric Adams, criticized the law’s 30-day residency requirement to be insufficient (Mays & Correal, 2022). However, Adams later expressed support for the bill and allowed it to become law after 30 days, effective on January 8, 2022.

NYC Event: Prominent Domains and Accounts

Our analysis of the Twitter conversation around the NYC Event focused on a period surrounding the January 8 passing of the law (January 1-16, 2022). We identified 75,548 related tweets, 82% of which were retweets and 57% of which included links to external domains. The most tweeted domains are visible in Table 1 below, and consist primarily of news organizations reporting on developments in the “Our City, Our Vote” law and subsequent lawsuit.

Table 1: Most tweeted domains for NYC Event

Table 1 lists the top 10 most linked to domains in tweets related to the NYC Event. The most shared articles from these outlets were primarily fact-based reporting on the legislation (“New York City mayor allows non-citizen voting bill to become law,” Axios) and the ensuing lawsuit by the RNC (“RNC sues NYC Mayor Adams over law allowing non-citizens to vote,” Fox News). Articles by hyperpartisan outlets Breitbart and Newsmax, however, framed the law as “diluting the voices of American citizens,” with the latter citing a statement by U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y. Overall, although the top linked domains consisted of outlets from different perspectives, the majority were from conservative leaning outlets — a subset of which have been identified as spreading false or misleading claims in the past.

In addition to widely amplified posts linking to news stories, tweets from primarily conservative political elites, influencers, and media personalities spread significantly. Outside of news outlets, the accounts with the most retweets in our dataset included tweets from U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y. (7,350 retweets), former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (3,060 retweets), U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo. (3,033 retweets), former Trump advisor Stephen Miller (2,551 retweets), former Trump-appointed U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grennell (2,187 retweets) and conservative media personality and influencer Tomi Lahren (2,006 retweets). These accounts shared messages in opposition to the “Our City, Our Vote” bill and ranged from comments about the bill being unconstitutional and how it is destined to be overturned in court (Claudia Tenney) to explicit conspiracy theorizing by Tomi Lahren:

2022-01-09 15:05 @TomiLahren: Non-citizens voting in NYC is just the start. It’s the pilot program for what the Dems will roll out across the nation by 2024. Why do you think they are opening our border…they are importing their voters. They MUST be STOPPED! #defundDemocrats

In the above tweet, Lahren explicitly states what many of the other accounts allude to. We discuss how online audiences interpreted this range of tweet framing below.

NYC Event: Timeline and Phases

The discourse around the NYC Event started shortly after New York City’s “Our City, Our Vote” bill became law on January 8, 2022. The event takes place across two primary phases, visualized in Figure 1 and discussed in more detail in the following sections. The first phase consists of initial reporting and reactions to the event of the “Our City, Our Vote” bill becoming law on January 8, 2022. This phase began on Twitter when Fox News posted a story about the law in the evening of January 8 followed by stories from other news outlets the following morning. 

The second phase began after New York Republicans sued to prevent the law from taking effect, filing the lawsuit on January 10, 2022 at 11:37 a.m. Eastern Time (Fossella et al. v. Adams, 2022). As can be seen in Figure 1, the lawsuit was filed directly after the conversation on Twitter had reached its highest peak. After the lawsuit was filed, the conversation on Twitter quickly shifted and integrated the lawsuit into conversation. The large dips in frequency of posting coincide primarily with night on the East Coast.

Tweets over time in NYC Non-citizen voter incident

Figure 1: A temporal graph showing the number of tweets per hour related to the NYC Event surrounding the Our City, Our Vote bill becoming law on January 8, 2022. The numbers map to the phases described below.

Phase 1: “Our City, Our Vote” Becomes Law; Before Republican Lawsuit

Initial reporting on bill becoming law reframed as “evidence” of Democrat-led conspiracy

At 9:40 p.m. EST January 8, Fox News published an article about the law, focusing on how NYC Mayor Eric Adams supported the passing of the law with the following headline: “NYC mayor says he supports recently passed legislation allowing 800,000 noncitizens to vote.” Fox’s article set off an initial cascade of attention. It was amplified by Tom Fitton (president of Judicial Watch, a conservative activist group) and accompanied on Twitter by an article from the New York Post with similar framing. However, the story didn’t take off fully until the next morning when other news outlets published articles about the law. Notably, Axios and ABC News published highly spread articles discussing the law which were widely tweeted, retweeted, and quote-tweeted by online audiences. 

Much of the discourse consisted of opinions and arguments that would not be considered misleading. Members of online audiences engaged in a highly charged conversation which included genuine criticism about the consequences of the law. However, in addition to this legitimate discourse, conspiracy theories were widely shared — e.g., about a broader, Democrat-led plan to intentionally import immigrants unauthorized to be in the U.S. and then give them the right to vote.

Quote tweets, in particular, often echoed and reinforced partisan frames around immigration and voting, including claims of a “border invasion” facilitated by Democrats in order to bolster their voter base (visible in Orange in Figure 1) — claims that share similarities to conspiracy theories around “Replacement Theory.” For example, Fox News contributor Sara Carter reframes the Axios article to fit with conservative rhetoric in the below tweet:

2022-01-09 22:36 @SaraCarterDC: I feel like I am in a science fiction film that continues to get worse - This should be a headline for @TheBabylonBee but it's real... frankly unconstitutional but....

Now you see why the border is wide open.

 <Quote Tweet> @axios: More than 800,000 noncitizens in NYC can now vote in local elections after Mayor Eric Adams allowed legislation to become law today.

In the above tweet, Carter seems to imply that the border is “wide open” so Democrats can allow immigrants into the country and give them the right to vote. Similar interpretations are visible from smaller accounts as well, e.g.:

2022-01-09 18:21 @[Anonymized] lmfao...this is what Democrats mean when they talk about voting rights.

 <Quote Tweet> @axios: More than 800,000 noncitizens in NYC can now vote in local elections after Mayor Eric Adams allowed legislation to become law today.

In this tweet, the user connects the NYC law to long-running political debates around voter ID laws and voter suppression. In this case, the user seems to imply that Democrat efforts to limit unnecessary voter ID laws that have been shown to have inequitable impacts (Hajnal et al., 2017) are actually part of a larger plan to allow non-citizen voting.

Phase 2: After Republican Lawsuit Challenging “Our City, Our Vote”

Phase 2 of the event began when New York State Republican Chairman Nick Langworthy and other New York Republicans filed a lawsuit to block the Our City, Our Vote law from remaining in place. Notably, the lawsuit was filed shortly after the conversation on Twitter was at its highest peak, suggesting a potential connection between generating opposition against Mayor Eric Adams and “Our City, Our Vote” via digitally amplified frames of doubt, and subsequent legal action taken against the Mayor and bill.

As soon as the lawsuit was filed it was amplified on Twitter by the GOP and partisan media outlets including Fox News, Newsmax, and Breitbart (Visible in Green and Yellow in Figure 1 during Phase 2). The conversation on Twitter continued in a similar way as it had in Phase 1, with the news about the Republican lawsuit received in a celebratory manner, often framed as Republicans fighting for justice against Democrats who were attempting to perpetrate voter fraud. For example, in the following tweet the user responds to the news of the GOP lawsuit in a supportive way, saying those involved with Our City, Our Vote passing deserve to be sued:

2022-01-10 21:26 @[Anonymized] They are unamerican and deserve to be sued. This is America 

<Quote Tweet> @newsmax: JUST IN: The RNC has sued New York City Mayor Eric Adams, the New York City Council, and the New York City Board of Elections in state court Monday for the new local law that permits noncitizens to vote in city elections.

Reception of the lawsuit was not simply supportive — conspiracy theorizing was also visible in reactions to the lawsuit. For example, some members of the online audience extrapolated from prima facie factual claims about the lawsuit and mayor to make vague claims about corruption, calling NYC a “cesspool”:

2022-01-10 22:45 @[Anonymized] Why is the first thing newly elected Democrats do is to cement their own power instead of helping citizens? First his brother is hired and now this BS. Corruption is everywhere. Disgusting! NYC is a cesspool! 

<Quote Tweet> @FoxNews: RNC sues NYC Mayor Adams over law allowing noncitizens to vote

The above tweet demonstrates how political speech is often extrapolated into more general claims that “corruption is everywhere,” often in a way that is reminiscent of calls to “drain the swamp” (i.e., the use of “cesspool”) that gained popularity in 2016.

NYC Event Themes

Neutrally Toned Reporting Was Reframed by Online Audiences

First, neutrally toned reporting from mainstream news outlets (e.g., Axios and ABC) was often commented on by online audiences in an adversarial way who used the articles as a foundation from which to theorize about Democrat plans to “import” voters and allow them to vote. For example, in the below tweet a Twitter user describes how they view “Our City, Our Vote” as part of a government “war against its own people”:

2022-01-09 18:20 @[Anonymized]: 800,000 noncitizens voting in NYC. That is even larger than the average U.S. congressional district.

Mass immigration is designed to disenfranchise U.S. citizens politically and economically. Government waging war against its own people. 

<Quote tweet> @axios: More than 800,000 non-citizens in NYC can now vote in local elections after Mayor Eric Adams allowed legislation to become law today. 

Similar reframing was also present for partisan outlets (e.g., Fox and Newsmax), although commentary in general was much more prevalent for the stories by Axios and ABC. Not all of the reframing was related to conspiracy theorizing, there appeared to be interpretations of the news articles ranging from support of the bill, to mild outrage (with no conspiracy theorizing, similar to the example above calling the defendants of the lawsuit “unamerican”), to explicit conspiracy theorizing, examples of which are visible in the above tweet as well as in the section below discussing the prevalence of conspiracy theorizing and in Tomi Lahren’s tweet discussed earlier.

Consistent Conspiracy Theorizing Regardless of Phase

The second prominent theme visible in the NYC Event is the consistency and amount of conspiracy theorizing across both Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the event (Orange in Figure 1). In the NYC Event, tweets engaged in conspiracy theorizing made up about a third of the total conversation. Although there was a range of discussion, there was an undertone that the legislation in New York a) was intentionally planned by Democrats, b) would spread across the country, and c) was connected to Democratic agendas related to voter ID laws, immigration reform, and requirements around providing proof of vaccination COVID status. These agendas were then (conspiratorially) framed as evidence that the Our City, Our Vote bill was a final step in a Democrat plan to first weaken immigration enforcement and voter ID restrictions, followed by removing citizenship requirements altogether. For example, in the following tweet, an audience member interprets a tweet that sowed doubt about the NYC Event and reframes the event as evidence of an alleged conspiracy:

2022-01-10 23:32 @[Anonymized]: It would certainly explain why Biden is allowing a flood of illegal aliens across the southern border. 

<Quote tweet> @CollinsforTX: New York City allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections should be seen as a slap in the face to every American citizen.

Democrats want to bring this nationwide.

If the GOP doesn't fight for election integrity, their voters will be disenfranchised forever.

It is important to emphasize that not all of the tweets in the event were related to the conspiracy theorizing (although it was prominent). Visible in blue in Figure 1 is some of the rhetoric that wasn’t explicitly conspiratorial in nature, although it appeared to be strongly partisan. This element of the conversation was critical of the law, but did so more as (often still combative) commentary, making claims that by allowing non-citizens to vote, the votes of citizens would be delegitimized, or even just that it wasn’t fair to all of those who had gone through the process of gaining citizenship.

Case 2: DOJ Lawsuit Against Arizona’s ‘Proof of Citizenship’ Law 

On July 5, 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against an Arizona law passed in March 2022 requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship in order to vote in the presidential election in that state. This law was passed despite a similar Arizona law being struck down in 2013 by a U.S. Supreme Court decision. That decision found that a state could not supersede the federal voter registration form which requires that voters attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens, but does not require proof. The online discourse around the DOJ lawsuit in Arizona (visualized in Figure 2 below) consisted primarily of commentary by conservative political elites, influencers, and partisan media outlets, with a smaller amount of engagement from Democrat-leaning accounts in support of the lawsuit. The majority of the conversation took place over the course of two days (July 5-6), with a lull overnight (as seen in Figure 2).

Figure 2: A temporal graph showing the volume of tweets per hour related to the AZ DOJ lawsuit event. 

AZ DOJ Lawsuit Event Prominent Domains and Accounts

The conversation on Twitter around the AZ DOJ Event consisted of 93,021 tweets, about 92% of which were retweets and about 14% of which included links to external domains. The event gained prominence on Twitter when a Guardian reporter (@srl) and Newsmax (@newsmax) reported on the DOJ lawsuit on Twitter, after which the event gained virality through the involvement of many different accounts and their audiences.

Accounts that received a large portion of retweets and/or quote tweets include Alex Bruesewitz, a conservative influencer whose Twitter profile states that he is a “Proud Recipient of a J6 ‘Committee’ Subpoena” (13,059 retweets and 3,337 quote tweets in total), conservative influencer Charlie Kirk (5,936 retweets and 361 quote tweets), Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend and former media personality Kimberly Guilfoyle (6,270 retweets and 543 quote tweets), U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz. (4,842 retweets and 709 quote tweets), conservative influencer Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth, 6,429 retweets and 170 quote tweets), and Guardian reporter Sam Levine (@srl, 5,454 retweets and 1,290 quote tweets). Additional prominent accounts and their relative position on the cumulative timeline are visible in Figure 3 below.

Similar to the NYC Event, the most retweeted tweets in the AZ DOJ Event primarily consisted of accounts that opposed the actions of Democrat opposition (in this case the DOJ). The content of tweets ranged from combative, and often misleading, political speech to explicit conspiracy theorizing. For example, Kirk’s most retweeted tweet echoed the conspiracy theorizing prevalent in the NYC Event, implying that the DOJ lawsuit is evidence of some larger Democrat plan:

2022-07-05 20:35 @charliekirk11: BREAKING:

The Biden DOJ is suing Arizona over a law that would require Proof of US Citizenship before voting

So the same Democrats who are letting millions of non-citizens flow freely into America also want to make it illegal to stop non-citizens from voting

I wonder why?

🤔

Kirk’s tweet demonstrates the temporal consistency of the voter-importation conspiracy theory visible in the events we examine as well as a “just asking questions” style of communication that we discuss in more detail below.

Figure 3:  Cumulative number of tweets, retweets, and replies surrounding the Arizona proof of citizenship law and subsequent DOJ lawsuit. Each shape is a related tweet, sized relative to the number of followers of the account. Only accounts with very high follower counts appear in the graph. For example, @charliekirk11 has more than 1.7M followers. However, smaller accounts do contribute to rise along the y axis.

Although only 14% of tweets linked to external domains in the AZ DOJ Event, outlets including Newsmax, The Guardian, and Fox News were prominent in our dataset. Table 2 lists the top 10 most linked to domains in tweets about the Arizona proof of citizenship law and subsequent DOJ lawsuit. The Guardian does not show up as a prominent domain because of the way the reporter, Sam Levine (@srl), posted the story on Twitter and limitations to our data collection method. Levine posted a brief summary of the story in tweet form without a link, and then replied to the initial tweet with a link to the story. The original tweet was highly retweeted, but the reply did not include the keywords we used for data collection so did not show up in our data.

Similar to the NYC Event list of domains, the Arizona list features a mix of mainstream news outlets (CNN, The Washington Post), conservative media (Fox News) and hyperpartisan conservative media and tabloids (Newsmax, The Gateway Pundit, Breitbart). The reporting in the top articles shared from these outlets was predominantly fact-based, and primarily focused on the DOJ's lawsuit against Arizona over the law. As we discuss below, even when the reporting was fact-based, many of the interpretations of the stories were not.

A table of domains with number of tweets linking to domain: FoxNews.com (2588); Newsmax.com (2311); DemocracyDocket.com (885); Breitbart.com (687); JusttheNews.com (549); NYPost.com (526); TheGatewayPundit.com (372); WashingtonPost.com (345)

Table 2: Most tweeted domains for the DOJ AZ Event

AZ DOJ Lawsuit Event Themes

Event Interpreted as Evidence in Support of Conspiracy Theory

Like the NYC Event, conspiracy theorizing about a larger Democratic plan to weaken border protections in order to bolster their voting base/commit some sort of voter fraud was prominent (orange in Figure 2). In the AZ DOJ Event, the conspiracy theorizing was even more apparent, making up more than half of the conversation on Twitter. As is visible in Charlie Kirk’s tweet above, the content of the conspiracy theories was similar across both events. Like the NYC Event, online audiences continued to reframe fact-based reporting as evidence of the conspiracy theories, e.g.:

2022-07-06 12:24 @[Anonymized]: What a POS DOJ. What arrogance to refuse to close the border. Biden and Mayorkas lie to us every time we question the *open border*. This at a border state whose people are paying the price.

Red Wave in November.

<Quote tweet> @newsmax: The Department of Justice is suing the state of Arizona with the intent of blocking a law that would oblige residents to provide proof of citizenship in order to vote in federal elections.

In the above tweet, the Twitter user connects the DOJ lawsuit to the open border and uses the conspiracy theory to motivate a call for a “Red Wave” in the upcoming midterm elections.

Unlike the NYC Event, there were a noticeable number of tweets explicitly connecting the lawsuit and accompanying conspiracy theorizing to claims that 2020 was stolen (blue in Figure 2), e.g.:

2022-07-06 18:54 @[Anonymized] The administration is telling on itself every day; still believe 2020 was truth? 

<Quote tweet> @FoxNews: Arizona AG torches Biden DOJ over lawsuit to block proof-of-citizenship voter law: 'Height of absurdity'

In the above tweet, the poster implies that the DOJ lawsuit is evidence that the Biden administration is “telling on itself” regarding its plans to steal elections, casting doubt about the results of the 2020 election and questioning the motives behind the lawsuit.

Promoting Conspiracy Theorizing by “Just Asking Questions”

Another aspect that differentiated the two events was the prominence in the AZ case of leading questions from political elites and influencers (purple in Figure 2), a hedging tactic identified in previous literature (Starbird, 2016). For example, in the following tweet Alex Bruesewitz implies that the DOJ lawsuit is evidence of conspiracy, but leans on his audience to make any explicit statements.

2022-07-05 21:20 @alexbruesewitz: Wow. The Biden DOJ is suing Arizona because they just passed a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.

What does that tell you?

Bruesewitz’s tweet was retweeted 8,807 times and quote-tweeted 1,438 times, making it the most engaged-with tweet in our dataset for the AZ DOJ Event, potentially suggesting that by including questions in provocative tweets, influencers are able to increase engagement at the same time as implying conspiracy without explicitly making a claim that may lead to moderation.

Bruesewitz was not alone in employing this “just asking questions” tactic (Charlie Kirk concluded a similar tweet, shown above, with “I wonder why?), but his tweets exemplify a similar theme to the one visible in the NYC Event: influencers often relied on audiences to interpret leading questions in a particular frame. Quote tweets in response to the leading questions of influencers provide some insight into audience interpretations of the lawsuit:

2022-07-06 12:24 @[Anonymized] It tells me they are doing everything they can to rig elections! Only US citizens have a right to vote. Illegals should have no say in anything let alone vote! 

<Quote tweet> @alexbruesewitz: Wow. The Biden DOJ is suing Arizona because they just passed a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.

What does that tell you?

In the above tweet, a member of the online audience responds directly to Bruesewitz’s prompt, illuminating how the tweet was interpreted. Responses to news headlines showed a similar pattern (visible in responses to Newsmax and Fox News above) and demonstrate how some members of the online audience reacted to the event based on the headlines and prompts of influencers.

Conclusion and Recommendations

It is important to note that the events we examined were politically charged and involved different groups with different perspectives. There were fact-based and genuine conversations about who should have the right to vote, but these were often extrapolated into conspiracy theorizing, making it difficult to determine where the line between genuine political criticism ended and conspiracy theorizing began. Although both events involved participation from audiences who aligned with both Democrats and Republicans, a majority of participation was made up of conservative audiences and influencers. In addition, the majority of conspiracy theorizing also originated from conservative leaning accounts that often explicitly named Democrats as the villains trying to cheat in elections.

Despite the complexity of conversations, conspiracy theorizing made up significant portions of discussion in each event (about a third in the NYC Event and over half in the AZ DOJ Event). The most prominent themes we identified related to the conspiracy theorizing across the two events are included below:

Neutral and fact-based reporting was reframed as proof of election delegitimization:

Previously primed online audiences often reframed factual events and reporting as evidence of a larger, unfounded, conspiracy theory, primarily revolving around Democrats intentionally weakening border protections in order to bring in immigrants unauthorized to be in the U.S. who they would then try to give the right to vote. Across both events, this process occurred shortly after the event started, where media outlets wrote factual content that became "evidence" for conspiracy theorizing, influencers jumped in to add "just asking questions" speculation or, in some cases, outright conspiracy theorizing, and everyday audience members added explicit (and false) claims of fraud/conspiracy, often reframing more neutrally toned headlines or tweets.

Stories were interpreted and reframed to cast doubt on both past and future elections:

Visible most explicitly in the conversation surrounding the DOJ lawsuit against Arizona, the themes we identified often referenced false claims surrounding the 2020 election and the continuing false narrative of the stolen election. The events we analyzed weren’t just used to provide “evidence” for theories of 2020 being stolen or general rhetoric around Democrats cheating, they were used to make future claims that Democrats were rigging elections including the upcoming midterms in 2022 and the next presidential election in 2024. 

Theories of non-citizen voting are not new, but rather echo older narratives:

Though the NYC voter law and DOJ lawsuit offered new fodder for theorizing around non-citizen voting, unsubstantiated claims about this topic have returned repeatedly over time. Through the Election Integrity Partnership, the CIP tracked hundreds of false, misleading and exaggerated claims about the 2020 election, several of which pushed similar narratives that non-citizens were voting in US elections in a ploy by Democrats to win. However, as mentioned above, similar misleading claims and conspiracy theories predate 2020 and were prominent in 2016 as well.

Recommendations 

Voters

  • As the 2022 midterm elections approach, voters should be aware of the potential for fact-based reporting around politically charged topics to be misleadingly framed by influencers, political elites, partisan outlets, and other members of online audiences. In the case of rhetoric around non-citizen voting, understanding the details of proposed policies, or of ongoing lawsuits, is essential, as oftentimes conspiracy theorizing arises from missing details. 

  • For example, in the AZ DOJ Event, federal law already requires an attestation of citizenship; the DOJ’s lawsuit is not based on any theory of non-citizens being allowed to vote but instead is motivated, at least in part, by the Arizona law putting an inequitable burden of proof on voters to prove their citizenship and the state law being contrary to U.S. Supreme Court precedent (U.S. Department of Justice, 2022). 

  • When uncertain of the factual nature of an event, seek out any existing fact checks or verify the details of policies before believing or sharing uncertain information.
    Additionally, knowing what level of identification is required in your state to vote will help avoid potential barriers come election day, a list of voter identification laws by state is available on Ballotpedia.

Election workers and administrators

  • Politically charged conversations around immigration and voting rights can lead to allegations of large-scale illegal voting by non-citizens. Often these allegations will focus on a procedural detail made contentious, elevating that item as an essential protection that is being undermined or corrupted. In reality, that detail is often a footnote to a much more robust system of detection and enforcement. 

  • Part of the success of such conspiracy theorizing relies on a general public that is unaware of the mechanisms that already exist to prevent and detect fraud. While addressing new claims directly is important, always take time to remind the public of the existing checks that are already in place, whether those are ID requirements, registration list audits, or something else.

  • Some election administrators have found it useful to “zoom out” even further, stressing in each communication that local election administration is transparent, has bipartisan oversight, and is staffed by trained professionals following the best practices of the profession. A combination of addressing the specific claim while framing it in the larger context of protections helps provide people understandings that may make them more resilient to the next theory that comes along. 

  • To help prepare for any questions and confusion resulting from highly charged and misleading online conversations, administrators are encouraged to build and promote Frequently Asked Questions pages that include specifics of protections against illegal voting as early as possible. FAQ pages are useful for providing accessible resources for reporters, community leaders, and ordinary citizens to help clear up confusions as they arise, potentially mitigating misinformation that would spread further if no, or less accessible, verification were available. 

Journalists

  • Journalists and news organizations should anticipate their fact-based reporting surrounding politically-charged immigration conversations to be wrapped into conspiracy theories by online audiences. Knowing what conspiracy theories are common surrounding specific themes may prove helpful for presenting factual information and including “prebunking” of known conspiracy theories in articles about emerging events. 

  • For example, in the case of the events we examined in this analysis, sentences could be included in articles that summarize and point to reliable resources that provide information surrounding federal vs. state voter ID requirements, clarify histories of non-citizen voting and differences between national and municipal voting, and discuss the history of conspiracy theorizing around non-citizen voting.

Platforms

  • Platform moderation efforts should attend to the prevalence of conspiracy theorizing surrounding highly charged conversations around immigration and non-citizen voting. There were numerous examples in our data of influential figures who promoted conspiracy theories directly (e.g., Tomi Lahren) and others who alluded to conspiracy theories but relied on audiences to make explicit claims.

  • Given the nuance of these conversations, moderation is difficult, but attending to patterns of behavior may aid in identifying accounts that repeatedly allude to conspiracy theories or call conspiracy theorists into action without making explicit claims (using the “just asking questions” style).

    Often, looking at how online audiences interpret ambiguous tweets provides the best signal as to what the author is implying, and may inform mitigation efforts.

Citations

Michael Grass
Previous

The DeJoy Case: Criticism of Poor Performance, Rumors of ‘Sabotage’
Next

A Statement from the Election Integrity Partnership