'They’re just coming after us': Project 2025 org is now harassing voter registration groups

04 October 2024

The voter registration groups helping new prospective voters navigate the bureaucracy of adding their names to the voter rolls are now having to contend with conservative activists harassing them.

That's according to a Friday report in the New York Times, which focused on how Latino voter registration in Arizona is being complicated by the far right ahead of the 2024 election. The Times reported that the Heritage Foundation — which is the organization behind the controversial Project 2025 authoritarian policy blueprint — is now deputizing conservatives to follow and film people helping Hispanic residents of swing states get registered ahead of the November election.

Hector Sanchez-Barba is the executive director of the group Mi Familia en Acción, which is on the ground in eight states including battleground states like Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. He told the Times that he's seen "a lot of intimidation on the front lines."

“My canvassers have been filmed, they’ve been yelled at,” Sanchez Barba said. “They’re just coming after us.”

Elsewhere around the country, advocacy groups have also been subjected to intimidation tactics when conducting outreach to Spanish-speaking communities. Latino Community Fund Georgia executive director Gigi Pedraza remarked that one incident in the Atlanta, Georgia area seemed "ethnically motivated" after a conservative activist filmed three women with voter registration forms outside of a butcher shop and spread it with the caption: "ILLEGALS BEING RECRUITED TO REGISTER TO VOTE."

“They were just sitting with the forms,” Pedraza told the Times. “You cannot register anyone to vote who’s not a citizen.”

The incidents may not be isolated, but rather part of a larger, well-funded effort headed by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project. Times reporter Jack Healy wrote that Heritage "has sent teams with hidden cameras posing as voter-outreach workers groups into apartment complexes in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia to ask the mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants there if they were citizens and registered to vote."

Conservatives have seized on the videos — which show some of the apartment residents telling Heritage's undercover videographers that they are registered to vote while not being U.S. citizens — to justify false claims that undocumented immigrants are being added to voter rolls in major battleground states. The people who were surreptitiously filmed have since said they misspoke and that they were not actually registered voters.

"[The videos show] somebody admitting on camera to a crime. It’s basically the best evidence that you can get," Oversight Project executive director Mike Howell told Healy.

However, the Times reported that in Georgia, election officials say there is no evidence of any non-citizens being added to the Peach State's database of registered voters. Now, groups like Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA (Spanish for "struggle) are training their organizers in de-escalation tactics in the event they're confronted by conservative activists.

"Canvassers are out there doing really hard work, and to be harassed and accosted by people believing these conspiracies — it’s just disappointing. They’re just doing their job," LUCHA spokesman César Fierros said.

Click here to read the Times' report in full (subscription required).

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