Conservative activists are monitoring — and filming — voter registration sites

One sweltering morning in Phoenix, four workers from a Latino nonprofit stood with clipboards outside a motor vehicle office to do the grunt work of democracy: persuading reluctant Americans to register to vote.

While most people took a voter application or moved on, Vlad Stepanov, a conservative video blogger, stopped when he saw the canvassers. To Stepanov, 33, the sight of them in matching “Poder Latinx” T-shirts, meaning Latinx Power, in a heavily Latino neighborhood of Phoenix was suspicious.

As his mother quietly filmed, he strode up to the canvassers. Were they registering noncitizens to vote? Who was funding them?

The canvassers insisted they were following Arizona laws and registering only citizens. “When you get your ID, we can help you register,” one told him.

“But that doesn’t prove I’m a citizen,” Stepanov responded.

It was another contentious day in the trenches of a bitterly fought election. As the ground game intensifies before many state voter registration deadlines in early October, suspicions of election fraud have turned the normally ho-hum work of registering voters into tense confrontations.

Despite the many debunked falsehoods about widespread voting by noncitizens, liberal Latino advocacy groups say they are being trailed by conservative activists with cameras and accused of registering immigrants living in the country without legal permission.

The conservative activists are recording them, tactics that have also targeted migrant shelters, Democratic politicians, abortion clinics and student protesters. They say they are just trying to expose flaws in the voter registration process.

Voter registration groups said that their canvassers had not reported any physical violence, and that their registration campaigns were undeterred. But some said they were increasingly concerned about safety and intimidation. Some tell canvassers to scrub their public social media profiles and avoid posting photos showing their location in real time. These days, many canvassers go out bracing for an argument about stolen elections.

“We see a lot of intimidation on the front lines,” said Hector Sanchez Barba, executive director of Mi Familia en Acción, a Latino nonprofit working in eight states, including the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.

“My canvassers have been filmed, they’ve been yelled at,” Sanchez Barba said. “They’re just coming after us.”

Scenes similar to the one in Phoenix have popped up in other states, including Florida, Georgia and Texas. National voting rights groups said it was unclear how often the confrontations were occurring, but said a drumbeat of anti-immigrant rhetoric and claims about noncitizen voting had intensified as the election drew closer.

“This is a political stunt designed to inflame,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group.

Multiple reviews have found voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare. The Brennan Center for Justice found that suspected — not confirmed — cases of noncitizen voting accounted for one ten-thousandth of 1% of votes cast in 2016.

It is a state and federal crime for noncitizens to register or vote, and prosecutors have pursued criminal charges in the relatively few documented cases where they have.

In Palm Beach, Florida, workers from Mi Familia en Acción say they have been confronted multiple times as they stand at a table handing out voter registration applications.

In one encounter captured on video in early July, two women were working to register new voters, children playing beside them, when a man carrying a camera approached to ask why they were there.

“You work for an NGO that is paid for by Soros-backed Democrats,” he said, referring to the financier and Democratic donor to nonprofit groups who is a perennial boogeyman for conservatives and antisemitic conspiracy theorists.

A county worker stepped in to tell the man that Mi Familia’s workers had the right to be there. But the unidentified man had none of it.

“They’re trying to do it with registering illegal voters,” he said.

Another afternoon this summer, Jeff Buongiorno, a Republican candidate for the elections supervisor in Palm Beach County, showed up to confront a different pair of registration workers from Mi Familia en Acción.

In a video of the encounter, Buongiorno and a woman accompanying him pepper the Mi Familia worker with questions. Are they citizens? Yes, she replies. Why are their T-shirts blue? The worker responds that it is a nonpartisan group.

He presses the workers about why they do not ask for identifications. (The rules vary by state, but in many places voters registering online, by mail or using forms are asked to provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, which are checked by election officials.)

“I’m not a crazy, radical guy,” he said in an interview. “We didn’t want to rough them up or throw them out.” Buongiorno said he had wanted to expose what he called vulnerabilities in voter registration systems, and did not harass or threaten anybody.

“To me, that’s a big threat vector,” Buongiorno said in an interview. “There’s a threat of synthetic identities being pumped into the system, or noncitizens.”

In San Antonio, a self-described conservative “citizen journalist” pulled out his phone when he spotted a Spanish-speaking woman with a clipboard who said she was helping people with voting and obtaining insurance. “They’re not citizens,” he told her. “They can’t vote.”

In the rapidly diversifying outskirts of Atlanta, three women with a local Latino advocacy group were surreptitiously filmed as they offered voter applications outside a butcher shop in the city of Cumming.

A local conservative activist quickly spread the video around with the baseless caption: “ILLEGALS BEING RECRUITED TO REGISTER TO VOTE.”

“They were just sitting with the forms,” said Gigi Pedraza, executive director of the Latino Community Fund Georgia, who said she thought the scrutiny was ethnically motivated. “You cannot register anyone to vote who’s not a citizen.”

The conservative Heritage Foundation has sent teams with hidden cameras posing as voter outreach workers groups into apartment complexes in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia to ask the mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants there if they were citizens and registered to vote.

Some people, their faces blurred in shaky videos, told Heritage’s investigators that they were registered to vote, but not citizens. The group said its survey showed a widespread threat to the upcoming election. Extrapolating from its conversations at one apartment complex, it said that some 47,000 noncitizens in Georgia could be on the voter rolls, as well as thousands more across the country.

But Georgia officials later said they had found no evidence that any of the people filmed by Heritage at the apartments in Norcross were actually registered. Some of the residents later said they had misspoken and denied being registered.

Mike Howell, the executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project, which made the videos, said the investigators said the videos were “somebody admitting on camera to a crime. It’s basically the best evidence that you can get.”

Latino nonprofit groups say the scrutiny has added new barriers to their efforts to register people in poorer communities who are often left out of the electoral process.

After the 2020 election, Florida and other states controlled by Republicans passed restrictions on voter registration drives and increased penalties and fines for groups that break the rules. Supporters of the stricter laws argue that they are necessary to prevent fraud, forgery and other abuses by unscrupulous voter registration groups.

“I worry about the safety of our staff a lot given the violent rhetoric we’ve seen ramp up,” said Mike Burns, the campus vote director for the Fair Elections Center, a nonprofit voting rights group that has roughly 400 “democracy fellows” helping to register and educate students at colleges this year.

Grassroots nonprofit group Living United for Change in Arizona — or Lucha, Spanish for “fight” — now gives its canvassers “de-escalation training” in case someone confronts them.

“It’s top of mind for us,” said César Fierros, a spokesperson for the group. “Canvassers are out there doing really hard work, and to be harassed and accosted by people believing these conspiracies — it’s just disappointing. They’re just doing their job.”

Outside the Phoenix DMV in September, the interaction between the Poder Latinx workers and Stepanov lasted just a few minutes.

Stepanov walked away and the canvassers went back to offering voter forms.

But that night, Stepanov posted a video of the interaction on social media — calling it “Voter Fraud in Arizona Exposed.” It caught fire with right-wing influencers and garnered more than 2 million views. Stepanov said in an interview that he had sent his wife out the next day, and hoped to shadow canvassers throughout the election.

“I told them I was going to make them famous,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.