Matt Cohen, senior reporter

In a recent, completely unhinged social media rant, Trump promised that “there will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” Obviously, Trump can’t do that, but he may think he can because of a ridiculous claim that there’s hidden language in the U.S. Constitution that vests electoral power in the federal government… which was discovered by a retired hotel manager in Florida.

• As election scholar Rick Hasen pointed out, John N. Goodman, a retired hotel manager in Florida, recently claimed he was looking at a microfilm copy of the original Constitution and found “a faded shadow” of text that says the federal government has electoral power over the states in certain circumstances.
  
  
• The research was shared with anti-voting activist Steve Stern — who hosts the popular MAGA podcast Stern American — who then shared it with MyPillow CEO and election conspiracist Mike Lindell, who in turn met with Trump to share the find.
  
  
• Trump’s post noted that he has “searched the depths of legal arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the near future.” Could this be the “irrefutable” legal argument Trump plans to present soon? Isn’t this the plot of National Treasure? 

If you spend any amount of time on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, you may have seen recent viral videos from right-wing influencers claiming voter fraud in places like California and Georgia. They are wrong — and my latest investigation looks at how, exactly, they’re peddling disinformation to serve the MAGA narrative. 

• In a recent video, Benny Johnson — an extremely popular MAGA content creator and known fabricator — is in front of a vacant lot in Venice Beach, California where, he claims, 26 people are registered to vote. Johnson doesn’t outright say it, but implies that there’s some sort of voter fraud happening.
  
  
• But the video is easily debunkable: California state law gives people experiencing homelessness the flexibility to use any location to register to vote. As long as unhoused residents can describe the place where they spend most of their time, they can legally list it as their address on their voter registration form.
  
  
• A series of videos by David Khait and Fabian Garcia claim to expose voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia, by visiting an abandoned homeless shelter, a UPS store, and a church that the influencers say at least 2,000 people use as their voter registration address.
  
  
• But their videos omit key information about Georgia’s voting laws — like how unhoused residents can use nonresidential addresses to help them register to vote, or the sometimes years-long process it takes to remove inactive voters from the state voter rolls — in order to push a false narrative about voter fraud.