Prominent leaders of the election denial movement flocked to Steve Bannon’s War Room to double down on their efforts targeting voter rolls across the country after they were recently exposed in a New York Times report. The campaigns highlighted by the Times in Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada are led by figures previously involved in supporting Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election, including former Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Bannon, who has been hammering that the 2020 election was stolen on a daily basis since before the first votes were cast, is now saying that Democrats plan to pull another heist in 2024. “The Democrats can’t win unless they steal,” he recently declared. But as the Times piece lays out, right-wing activists are relying on legal loopholes and even “an obscure state law from the 1950s” to launch mass challenges of voter registration in heavily Democratic areas in hopes that it will benefit Trump.

The Times report describes a loosely connected network of state-based activists targeting local boards of election to challenge voter registrations they believe to be fraudulent or inaccurate, relying on faulty technology they’ve designed themselves to maximize the number of challenges. In the case of Michigan, these efforts have targeted communities “in dense areas of Detroit and in student housing in Ann Arbor, both overwhelmingly Democratic cities.” These tactics are reminiscent of election deniers’ recruitment and training efforts ahead of the 2022 midterms, when Bannon and other right-wing media figures promoted calls for volunteers to stand watch around ballot drop boxes. According to the Times’ March 3 article, even unsuccessful challenges can hurt voter access: “In some states, a challenge alone is enough to limit a voter’s access to a mail ballot, or to require additional documentation at the polls. Privately, activists have said they consider that a victory."

On March 5, Bannon responded to the New York Times report after it was covered by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who highlighted the story and interviewed one of the reporters on her March 4 show.

“You should have seen her face, it was like in tears because they understand that we are fighting back at a grassroots level and will not allow under any circumstances a repeat of how this election was stolen in 2020,” he said.

He then introduced Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of True the Vote, a leading election denial group whose bogus research provided fodder for right-wing podcaster Dinesh D’Souza’s discredited film 2000s Mules that falsely alleged thousands of operatives in key swing states strategically stuffed ballot boxes with illegal votes for President Joe Biden. True the Vote is closely connected to the QAnon movement, acting as a liaison between conspiracy theorists and law enforcement in efforts to target supposed voter fraud.

“It’s another day in bizarro world,” Engelbrecht began. “They want to hardwire an inaccurate process and institutionalize the fraud, and then they use these media puppets to try to convince us that wrong is right.” 

She went on, “We’re sick of it and we are fighting back, and we’re winning.”

The New York Times report notes that the most mass challenges launched in the context of the 2020 election took place in Georgia in an effort organized by True the Vote. According to the Times, “360,000 voters were challenged in the 2021 Senate runoff elections alone. In 2023, more than 8,600 voters had their registrations challenged in five major counties.” The report indicates that Engelbrecht intends to ramp these efforts back up in 2024 using a new software program that will “help citizens file challenges on their own.” In 2022, Wired Magazine reviewed the code underlying the software promulgated by Engelbrecht and True the Vote and found it “ultimately uses an ineffective and unreliable methodology to determine who should stay on the rolls.”

“Please engage, engage, engage,” Engelbrecht pleaded on War Room. “This year, voting is not enough. Please engage, serve, be a part of your local elections. We are winning."

Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump lawyer and leader of the election denial group Election Integrity Network, joined Bannon after Engelbrecht.

“You guys have gone around the country, you’re doing training, you’re recruiting people at every level, you’re building momentum, you’re building will power but you’re also now starting to work in soft alliances,” Bannon said while introducing Mitchell. “Why are they picking on you?”

“They hate the fact that there are people, patriots all over this country,” Mitchell said in response to the Times’ reporting. “We need many, many, many more members of the posse to get engaged, get involved, and help us."

The New York Times report highlighted a Michigan-based voter purge campaign led by a group calling itself “Soles to the Rolls,” an offshoot of Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, as the most successful effort to target supposedly incorrect voter registrations:

Mitchell later said, “They are opposed to what we are doing because they want to cheat. They’re cheats. Democrats are cheaters.” She explained that her work is motivated to protect noncitizens — who she referred to as “these aliens that are coming in, flooding into the country” — from being manipulated by Democrats into illegally voting. (There is no evidence that undocumented immigrants are voting in significant numbers.)

“That’s the No. 1 takeaway from that New York Times article and Rachel Maddow: They don’t want the law to be followed,” Mitchell said. “We want a lawful election. If we have a lawful election, we have a chance to win. They want to cheat. We have to stop them."

“If we have a lawful election, Trump wins in a landslide,” Bannon replied. “They have to steal it, they know that.”

No bogus rant on War Room about a stolen election would be complete without an appearance from Mike Lindell, a leading election conspiracy theorist underwriting the right-wing media with his avalanche of advertising. The Times report noted that a “top deputy” to Lindell “helped conceive of the data program the activists use to hunt for suspicious voters” in Michigan, and the pillow maven followed other election denial leaders in responding to the article on Bannon’s show.

“They're really worried about the stuff we're doing on the ground that you just heard that these other groups are doing,” he said. “We're all — we're all tied together, Steve, we all want the same thing: Secure our election platforms."

After a break, Lindell returned to sell slippers, towels, and bedding, discounted just for the War Room audience.

“Get ‘em today, I don’t know how much longer they’re going to last,” the pillow maven said. “Promo code War Room.”