Election Deniers Think the GOP's Terrible Midterm Polling Is a'Psyop' Dozens and dozens of high profile MAGA influencers and pundits have weighed in. "The laughable fake polls are rolling out," Catturd posted on X. Taking their lead from president Donald Trump, election deniers have dismissed the GOP's terrible polling numbers by claiming the polls themselves are fake, a psyop, or a ploy to stop Republicans from turning out to vote in November. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, told Fox News that midterm election polling is a "psyop to depress conservative turnout." "The midterms are near," Phillip Buchanan, the election denier and MAGA troll known online as Catturd, wrote to his four million followers on X. "The laughable fake polls are rolling out." For over a decade, Trump has claimed without evidence that American elections have been impacted by fraud.

Since 2020, Donald Trump and his devotees have sown doubt over election results and spread dozens of election conspiracies. Some of these election deniers have become elected officials themselves, serving as governors and US senators. Others, like Mike Lindell, have spent millions of dollars in hopes of overturning the 2020 election. On WIRED.com and in our new podcast, the WIRED Politics team reported that many of these election deniers on both the national and grassroots level have been training others to challenge voter rolls and overwhelm election officials even before polls open in November. And they're using tech to do it.

Many US election deniers have spent the past three years inundating local election officials with paperwork and filing thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests in order to surface supposed instances of fraud. "I've had election officials telling me that in an office where there's one or two workers, they literally were satisfying public records requests from 9 to 5 every day, and then it's 5 o'clock and they would shift to their normal election duties," says Tammy Patrick, CEO of the National Association of Election Officials. In Washington state, elections officials were receiving so many FOIA requests following the 2020 presidential elections about the state's voter registration database that the legislature had to change the law, rerouting these requests to the Secretary of State's office to relieve the burden on local elections workers. "Our county auditors came in and testified as to how much time having to respond to public records requests was taking," says democratic state senator Patty Kederer, who cosponsored the legislation. "It can cost a lot of money to process those requests. And some of these smaller counties do not have the manpower to handle them. You could easily overwhelm some of our smaller counties."