Right-Wing Activists Are Challenging Tens Of Thousands Of Voter Registrations

In his 34 years working in elections, Wesley Wilcox had never experienced what happened to him just a couple of weeks ago. A woman who said she was involved with the conspiracy theory group True the Vote came to his office with a list of names about 2,500 entries long, spanning about 800 printed pages.

She was challenging thousands of her neighbors’ eligibility to vote, and was urging Wilcox, the supervisor of elections in Marion County, Florida, to investigate them, and potentially, remove them from voter rolls altogether.

“This is by far the largest set of ‘challenges’ that have ever been delivered to this office,” Wilcox told HuffPost. “Exponentially so.”

And Wilcox isn’t alone. Since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely blamed widespread voter fraud, right-wing activists have sought to “clean” the election system by deleting tens of thousands of their neighbors from voter rolls.

They’ve been aided in their work by groups like True the Vote and the Election Integrity Network, which have promoted software that makes it easy to challenge the eligibility of thousands of voters at a time, simply by comparing U.S. Post Office change-of-address data to voter rolls and other lists. Across the country, activists are taking these lists to their local election officials, urging them to purge voters.

As Wilcox looked through a sample of the 2,500 names that were challenged in Marion County, he told HuffPost, he couldn’t find a single valid challenge. Instead, the challenges had been filed against a mix of legitimate, eligible voters; voters who simply shared common names like “David Martin” or “Rebecca Bennet”; and names that Wilcox had already removed from the voter rolls himself ages ago, either because the