“We’re going to have to address urgent needs while doing the long-term work to achieve structural change,” said one organizer. "We are going to need everyone to fight back."
2 months ago
People wait in line to vote outside a polling station on Election Day in Nazareth, Pa., on Nov. 5. (Samuel Corum/AFP via Getty Images)
This story originally appeared on NPR.
A day before the election, James O’Keefe, a content creator known for making undercover videos, posted a video on X alleging an employee at an NGO and a local official in Philadelphia were incorrectly advising noncitizens that they could vote.
“This is the smoking gun of attempted election theft,” wrote the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as he shared the video with his 3 million followers on X, the social media platform once known as Twitter.
But as Trump’s win became apparent the following evening, claims about potential noncitizen voter fraud — a dominant message among Trump and his supporters this election season — mostly dried up online.
Last month, CBS obtained a video where Womack included “Hispanic-sounding last names” as a factor to consider when deciding whether someone on the voter rolls is suspicious.
“If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information … and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” Womack said, according to CBS.
Womack confirmed to NPR that he had made those comments, but said the same would be true for other kinds of last names. “We were not targeting Hispanic voters and we never have,” he said.
When NPR spoke to Womack on Thursday, he said he did not yet know how many early voting challenges his organization’s volunteers would be filing with county officials in the coming days.
“It’s still very early after the election,” he said when asked his view about the role noncitizens played in this year’s contest. “I don’t think noncitizens had a dramatic impact on the election.”