The DC-based Heritage Foundation has long spread disinformation about elections, claiming there is widespread voter fraud despite ample evidence to the contrary. More recently, it has gained attention for its authoritarian and antidemocratic Project 2025 plan for a second Trump administration.
Ahead of this fall’s election, Heritage has been at the forefront of pushing the lie that noncitizens are registering and voting in significant numbers, laying the groundwork for election deniers to use in case the results don’t go their way.
Now its efforts to undermine trust in elections have taken a dangerous new turn — a boots-on-the-ground approach to fish for voter fraud where there is none. In July, men working with Heritage knocked on the doors of suspected noncitizens in an apartment complex outside Atlanta, asking about the residents’ citizenship status and whether they are registered to vote. The pair misrepresented themselves as being with a company that assists Latinos with navigating the election system and secretly videotaped their interactions.
Several of the people said they were noncitizens and had registered, which the Heritage Foundation touted as supporting its false claims on the topic — but according to state investigators, the New York Times reported, there is no record of any of these people being registered. At least one of the people recorded told investigators that she was just giving answers she hoped would make the two men go away.
But Heritage posted the videos to its website and claimed that based on a mere 7 people, 14 percent of noncitizens in Georgia were registered to vote — an estimated 47,000 people. It’s a ludicrous assertion. The office of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state dismissed the video as a “stunt.”
Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation used its social media presence to amplify similar deceptive behavior, which led to online harassment and death threats for the leader of a nonprofit assisting asylum-seekers. In April, Anthony Rubin — the founder of Muckraker, an online media website with “very, very powerful” ties to Heritage — and his brother misrepresented themselves as staff members of an immigrants rights organization seeking to volunteer at a nonprofit providing services to asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. Rubin kept trying to get staff at the nonprofit to state they would help migrants vote for Biden. In a multi-part thread on social media, Heritage posted a snippet of a conversation between Rubin and the head of the nonprofit, in which she is misconstrued as encouraging noncitizens to vote.
In its quest to convince people that fraud is rampant, the organization has now resorted to unconscionable behavior that puts people at risk of harassment. Secretly videotaping people in conversations under false pretenses is not a way to expose voter fraud, — which itself is vanishingly rare — but it is a way to get false information, risk intimidating eligible voters in violation of federal and state laws, and sow doubt in the integrity of our elections.
The Heritage Foundation is using old scare tactics
While these methods may be new to the organization, we’ve seen them before from others. And it hasn’t ended well for the perpetrators.
Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, long used unverified, undercover, and deceptively edited recordings to misconstrue the truth, including about supposed voter fraud. In 2020, the group published an unverified video that the campaign of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MI) had collected ballots illegally, as well as videos falsely alleging voter fraud in one Pennsylvania city. In the Pennsylvania incident, the group ended up settling a lawsuit brought by the local postmaster and publicly apologized, noting that it was not aware of any evidence of fraud in the that city during the 2020 election.
In 2016, a Project Veritas member infiltrated a democratic consulting firm and secretly recorded conversations. The firm claimed the footage was then “heavily edited” to suggest that the firm conspired to incite violence at Trump rallies and promote voter fraud. In a civil lawsuit, Project Veritas was found liable for misrepresentation and violating wiretapping laws, and was required to pay $120,000 in damages. And in 2009, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe secretly recorded conversations with staff at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN was a network of community-based organizations advocating for low and moderate-income families. The deceptively edited videos construed ACORN employees as advising O’Keefe on tax evasion. But the videos set off a political firestorm that led to public funding for ACORN to be cut off, effectively shuttering the organization. Later, O’Keefe faced a civil lawsuit from a former-ACORN staff member and settled for $100,000.
In 2016 and 2017, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal organization, published two reports purporting to show that thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote in Virginia. The reports included the home addresses and phone numbers of many innocent people, including U.S. citizens. Four of those citizens sued PILF for defamation and voter intimidation. The case settled in 2019, and the leader of PILF was required to issue a written apology.
The disgraceful tactics employed by these groups have failed to hold up in court time and again, and now Heritage looks like it wants to join their ranks.
As for the issue of noncitizen voting — it’s a myth. Noncitizen voting does not occur in any significant manner, and it’s already illegal under federal and state law. The Heritage Foundation’s actions are hurting our democracy, not helping it.
