The Sunday Story: How the far right is making voter fraud easier

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NPR

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4.5 • 52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

For nearly a decade, the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, quietly helped to clean up voter databases and catch fraud. It was a rare bipartisan success story, with Democrats praising it and Republicans calling it a "godsend."

But recently, it has become the target of a Trump-allied lawyer and the far right. NPR Voting Correspondent Miles Parks and NPR's Investigations Team trace how conspiracy theories, secret meetings, and grassroots pressure are dismantling this obscure elections tool and giving election deniers their biggest policy victory yet.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When far-right candidates lost in swing states in last year's midterms,
0:04.2	it seemed clear that voters weren't buying the stolen election narrative
0:07.4	that many of these candidates had pushed.
0:09.8	But in many parts of the country that false notion is still flourishing.
0:13.7	In large part because of a woman named Cleda Mitchell.
0:17.1	Thank you, Cleda Mitchell. Thank you for that explanation.
0:19.0	Really interesting. And kind of a ballad.
0:20.8	Thank you, Tucker.
0:21.7	Cleda Mitchell is somebody with great courage and she's involved.
0:24.5	If you don't remember Mitchell, she's an election attorney
0:26.9	who was a central player in former President Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election.
0:32.4	She was on that infamous phone call when Trump
0:34.6	pressured Georgia election officials about the state's results.
0:38.0	But the people in Georgia and the people of America have a light to know the answers.
0:43.0	Mitchell hosts a podcast about voting.
0:45.6	Hello. Welcome to this episode of Who's Counting with Cleda Mitchell.
0:50.1	This is a pod.
0:50.9	Now Mitchell's influence is growing and the fringe conspiracies on her show
0:55.1	are pushing Republicans to abandon one of the best tools out there to fight voter fraud.
1:05.6	I'm Rachel Martin and this is the Sunday story from up first.
1:08.8	NPR Voting Correspondent Miles Parks, along with our investigation team,
1:12.9	has been tracing a year-long pressure campaign to sabotage a bipartisan voting success story.
	...

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