Kris William Kobach is an American lawyer and politician who has served as the attorney general of Kansas since 2023. He previously served as the 31st secretary of state of Kansas from 2011 to 2019. A former chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, Kobach rose to national prominence over his support for anti-immigration advocacy, including involvement in the implementation of high-profile anti-illegal immigration ordinances in various American cities. Kobach is also known for his calls for stronger voter ID laws in the United States. He has made claims about the extent of election fraud in the United States that some studies and media have said are unsubstantiated.
Hans Anatol von Spakovsky is an American attorney and a former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). He is the manager of The Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He is an election denier. He has been described as playing an influential role in making concern about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party.
Thomas J. Fitton is an American conservative activist and the president of Judicial Watch.
John Charles Eastman is an American lawyer and academic who has been criminally indicted, ordered inactive by the State Bar of California, and recommended for disbarment for attempting to keep then-president Donald Trump in office and obstruct the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 United States presidential election. Eastman has lost eligibility to practice law in California state courts, pending his appeal of the state bar judge's ruling that recommended him for disbarment. Eastman is also a co-conspirator in the federal indictment brought against Trump over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election results and prevent the certification of Biden’s election.
Brian Porter Kemp is an American politician serving since January 2019 as the 83rd governor of Georgia. A member of the Republican Party, Kemp served as the 27th secretary of state of Georgia from 2010 to 2018, and as a member of the Georgia State Senate from 2003 to 2007.
Voter ID laws in the United States are laws that require a person to provide some form of official identification before they are permitted to register to vote, receive a ballot for an election, or to actually vote in elections in the United States.
Project Veritas is an American far-right activist group founded by James O'Keefe in 2010. The group produces deceptively edited videos of its undercover operations, which use secret recordings in an effort to discredit mainstream media organizations and progressive groups. Project Veritas also uses entrapment to generate bad publicity for its targets, and has propagated disinformation and conspiracy theories in its videos and operations.
Voter suppression in the United States consists of various legal and illegal efforts to prevent eligible citizens from exercising their right to vote. Such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election. Voter suppression has historically been used for racial, economic, gender, age and disability discrimination. After the American Civil War, all African-American men were granted voting rights, but poll taxes or language tests were used to limit and suppress the ability to register or cast a ballot. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 improved voting access. Since the beginning of voter suppression efforts, proponents of these laws have cited concerns over electoral integrity as a justification for various restrictions and requirements, while opponents argue that these constitute bad faith given the lack of voter fraud evidence in the United States.
The 2020 United States presidential election was the 59th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. The Democratic ticket of former vice president Joe Biden and the junior U.S. senator from California Kamala Harris defeated the incumbent Republican president, Donald Trump, and vice president, Mike Pence. The election took place against the backdrop of the global COVID-19 pandemic and related recession. The election saw the highest voter turnout by percentage since 1900, with each of the two main tickets receiving more than 74 million votes, surpassing Barack Obama's record of 69.5 million votes from 2008. Biden received more than 81 million votes, the most votes ever cast for a candidate in a U.S. presidential election.
Voter impersonation, also sometimes called in-person voter fraud, is a form of electoral fraud in which a person who is eligible to vote in an election votes more than once, or a person who is not eligible to vote does so by voting under the name of an eligible voter. In the United States, voter ID laws have been enacted in a number of states by Republican legislatures and governors since 2010 with the purported aim of preventing voter impersonation. Existing research and evidence shows that voter impersonation is extremely rare. Between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 documented instances of voter impersonation. There is no evidence that it has changed the result of any election. In April 2020, a voter fraud study covering 20 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found the level of mail-in ballot fraud "exceedingly rare" since it occurs only in "0.00006 percent" of individual votes nationally, and, in one state, "0.000004 percent — about five times less likely than getting hit by lightning in the United States."
The social policy of the Donald Trump administration was generally socially conservative. As of 2016, Donald Trump described himself as pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest, and circumstances endangering the life of the mother. He said he was committed to appointing justices who may overturn the ruling in Roe v. Wade. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices during his presidency. All of them later went on to vote in the majority opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court case overturning Roe v. Wade and ending federal abortion rights nationwide.
The Gateway Pundit (TGP) is an American far-right fake news website. The website is known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.
Gregg Allen Phillips is the former head of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, Deputy Commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, and the author of a tweet cited by U.S. President Donald Trump that falsely alleges, without evidence, that between three and five million non-citizens voted in the 2016 elections. Phillips executive produced and appeared in Dinesh D’Souza's debunked political film 2000 Mules and pushed a conspiracy theory about election fraud. He was partnering on a project with a Texas-based, partisan-conservative organization named True the Vote which falsely alleges widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, even though "on the record there has been still no evidence or proof provided that there was any sort of fraud".
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, also called the Voter Fraud Commission, was a Presidential Commission established by Donald Trump that ran from May 11, 2017, to January 3, 2018. The Trump administration said the commission would review claims of voter fraud, improper registration, and voter suppression. The establishment of the commission followed Trump's false claim that millions of illegal immigrants had voted in the 2016 presidential election, costing him the popular vote. Vice President Mike Pence was chosen as chair of the commission and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was its vice chair and day-to-day administrator.
Fish v. Kobach was a 2018 bench trial in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas in which five Kansas residents and the League of Women Voters contested the legality of the Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC) requirement of the Kansas Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act, which was enacted in 2011 and took effect in 2013.
In the United States, Sanders–Trump voters, also known as Bernie–Trump voters, are Americans who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 or 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, but who subsequently voted for Republican Party nominee Donald Trump in the general election. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, these voters comprised an estimated 12% of Sanders supporters. At least another 12% of Sanders supporters did not vote for Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton, but also did not vote for Trump.
After Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, Republican nominee and then-incumbent president Donald Trump pursued an unprecedented effort to overturn the election, with support and assistance from his campaign, proxies, political allies, and many of his supporters. These efforts culminated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack by Trump supporters, which was widely described as an attempted coup d'état. One week later, Trump was impeached for incitement of insurrection but was acquitted by the Senate by a vote of 57–43, 10 votes short of the 67 votes required to convict him.
On January 2, 2021, during an hour-long conference call, then-U.S. President Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the state's election results from the 2020 presidential election. Trump had been defeated by Joe Biden in the election, but refused to accept the outcome, and made a months-long effort to overturn the results. Prior to the call to Raffensperger, Trump and his campaign spoke repeatedly to state and local officials in at least three states in which he had lost, urging them to recount votes, throw out some ballots, or replace the Democratic slate of electors with a Republican slate. Trump's call with Raffensperger was reported by The Washington Post and other media outlets the day after it took place.
Absolute Proof is a 2021 political propaganda film directed by and starring Mike Lindell. It was distributed by One America News Network and promotes the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election instead of Joe Biden. The documentary was removed by video hosting sites YouTube and Vimeo for violating their community standards.
The election denial movement in the United States is a widespread false belief among certain conservatives that any United States election not resulting in a desired Republican victory has been rigged and stolen through voter fraud by Democrats. Adherents of the movement are referred to as election deniers. Voter fraud conspiracy theories have spread online and through conservative conferences, community events, and door-to-door canvassing. Since the 2020 United States presidential election, many Republican politicians have sought elective office or taken legislative steps to address what they assert is weak election integrity leading to widespread fraudulent elections, though no evidence of systemic voter fraud has come to light and voter fraud is extremely rare.
