Special counsel Jack Smith alleged in a recently unsealed filing that as part of their 2020 election subversion conspiracy, Donald Trump and his allies entirely fabricated their claims about noncitizens voting. Similar lies are at the heart of right-wing media’s current efforts to undermine the 2024 vote in the lead-up to November’s presidential election. 

Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax together aired at least 141 claims fearmongering about noncitizens voting in the 2024 elections over the last month, according to a Media Matters review.

Smith writes that at Trump’s federal criminal trial for his attempt to subvert the election, the government will demonstrate that Trump and his alleged co-conspirators “repeatedly changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations” and thus their “lies were proved by the fact that they made up figures from whole cloth.” 

The filing continues (citations deleted):

One example concerns the defendant and conspirators’ claims about non-citizen voters in Arizona. The conspirators started with the allegation that 36,000 non-citizens voted in Arizona; five days later, it was “beyond credulity that a few hundred thousand didn’t vote”; three weeks later, “the bare minimum [was] 40 or 50,000. The reality is about 250,000”; days after that, the assertion was 32,000; and ultimately, the conspirators landed back where they started, at 36,000—a false figure that they never verified or corroborated.

Noncitizen voting is illegal in federal elections and vanishingly rare, and there is no evidence of large numbers of undocumented immigrants registering to cast ballots. 

That has not stopped generations of conservatives from baselessly stoking fears about Democrats using the votes of noncitizens to win elections — and that right-wing propaganda campaign has dramatically escalated this election cycle. 

Trump’s media propagandists followed his lead

Trump and his allies largely focused on dishonestly attacking mail-in voting as a purported vector for fraud in 2020. This year, they’ve downplayed those concerns as the GOP built its own mail-in voting campaign. 

Instead, Trump is warning that an avalanche of noncitizen votes could swing the race as he tries to undermine confidence in the election results. He declared at last month’s presidential debate that there are “illegal immigrants coming” and “they’re trying to get them to vote,” echoing a version of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that was once limited to white nationalist fever swamps but is now part of the GOP dogma. He also urged congressional Republicans to pass the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” or SAVE Act — unnecessary legislation for a fake problem.

Media Matters reviewed coverage on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax between September 6, when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) unveiled a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown that included the text of the SAVE Act, through October 2.

We found that Fox Business aired 34 claims fearmongering about noncitizen voting over that period, Fox News aired 42, and Newsmax aired 65. 

On Fox News alone, guests and personalities warned that the Biden administration has “resettled” undocumented immigrants in “American cities and towns” to “interfere in the electoral process of the United States”; baselessly claimed that migrants are “lining up to vote right now”; declared the “illegal voting issue” to be “a national crisis”; and alleged that “Democrats can't win lawfully, so they're trying to make sure that they turn their cheek the other way instead of enforcing the laws that require citizens to vote.”

Maria Bartiromo, the notorious election denier whose attempts to bolster Trumpian conspiracy theories in 2020 helped cost her employer hundreds of millions of dollars, provided the most frequent venues for such falsehoods. Her weekday Fox Business show had the most claims fearmongering about noncitizens voting of any program during the studied period, with 20, while her weekend Fox News show led that network with 11 claims. 

The goal appears the same as it was in 2020 — ensure that if Trump loses and declares the election had been rigged against him, viewers are predisposed to believe him.

These claims may be made out of “whole cloth,” as Smith alleges they were in 2020. But that won’t prevent Trump's loyal right-wing media propagandists from coming to his aid.