Washington — Election Deniers Stoke Fraud Fears Before Midterms

Figures who amplified Donald Trump's false claims of mass voter fraud after the 2020 election are making fresh allegations about voting-machine security a month before the November midterms, according to The Guardian.

The claims are surfacing on conservative-friendly outlets rather than in court filings or state audits, the Guardian reported Tuesday. No election security agency or voting-machine vendor is quoted in the report disputing the specific allegations, and the Guardian's account does not cite any new state or federal findings of fraud.

What are the new claims about Georgia's voting machines?

Cleta Mitchell, a former politician who worked to help Trump overturn the 2020 results, pointed to recent reports of a privacy vulnerability in Georgia's voting machines to argue the state is not doing enough to secure ballots, per the Guardian. Mitchell made the claim Friday in an interview with conservative strategist Steve Bannon.

"The problem in Georgia is that they use a version of these machines where … the machine doesn't count the choices. The machine actually counts a QR code," Mitchell told Bannon, according to the Guardian's report.

The Guardian's account does not include a response from Georgia election officials or the machine's manufacturer, and it does not specify the scope or cause of the reported vulnerability beyond Mitchell's characterization.

Who is Cleta Mitchell and why does her claim carry weight with some conservatives?

Mitchell was involved in efforts to challenge the 2020 election outcome on Trump's behalf, the Guardian noted, which gives her remarks traction among audiences already primed to distrust voting technology. Her appearance on Bannon's program — a platform with a loyal conservative following — extended the reach of the claim beyond traditional political reporting, according to the Guardian.

What is Ed Martin claiming about machine components?

Ed Martin, described by the Guardian as a controversial former U.S. pardon attorney, repeated claims from unnamed top administration officials that voting machines using parts manufactured in China and other countries were "compromised." The Guardian's report does not name the officials, cite a specific machine model, or point to an independent security assessment backing the claim.

Why are some conservatives calling Senate flip predictions a "psyop"?

Separately from the machine-security claims, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told Fox Business in September that forecasts of Democrats retaking the Senate were "a psyop," the Guardian reported — a term popularized online to describe something believed to be a covert influence operation by authorities. Roberts' organization produced Project 2025, the Guardian noted, giving the remark added weight within conservative policy circles even though the Guardian's report does not cite polling data, seat counts, or forecasting models to evaluate the claim either way.

The Guardian frames both threads — machine-security allegations and outcome skepticism — as part of a broader pattern in which officials who backed Trump's 2020 fraud claims are pre-positioning doubt ahead of results that could go against Republicans next month.

What's confirmed, and what remains unverified?

Three things are documented in the Guardian's reporting: Mitchell's QR-code claim about Georgia machines, made in a Friday interview with Bannon; Martin's claim about foreign-made components, echoing unnamed administration officials; and Roberts' "psyop" characterization, made to Fox Business in September. What is not documented in the available reporting is any independent verification — from a state election board, a federal cybersecurity agency, or the machine vendors themselves — of the underlying security or fraud allegations. The Guardian's piece also does not quote any current Georgia election official on the record addressing Mitchell's specific claim.

For readers trying to separate confirmed vulnerabilities from political messaging, the distinction matters: a privacy flaw in how a machine stores or displays data is a different claim than evidence that votes were miscounted or that an election outcome was altered. The Guardian's report conflates the two only in the sense that it describes both appearing in the same wave of conservative media appearances, not in the sense that one has been shown to cause the other.

With early voting approaching in multiple states, the volume of these claims is likely to rise through Election Day, the Guardian's framing suggests, even as the specific technical allegations remain unresolved in the public record reviewed for this story.