Originally Published: May 9, 2024 12:23 p.m.

The Republicans are getting the "Stop The Steal" band back together ahead of this year's presidential race. 

On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) unveiled a piece of legislation that would prohibit non-citizens from voting in federal elections. Of course, it is already illegal for people who are not U.S. citizens to cast a ballot in federal races and a pile of studies have shown that violations of these laws have occurred exceedingly rarely. Nevertheless, congressional Republicans and other allies of former President Trump are making a big show of fear mongering about the issue as he pre-emptively indicates his willingness to dispute this year's election. And this latest effort to cast doubt on voting features many of the same figures who were involved in the similarly debunked effort to challenge Trump's loss in the 2020 White House race.

Perhaps no one illustrates this better than Jenny Beth Martin, a Tea Party activist who joined Johnson for the Capitol Hill press conference Wednesday when he railed against what he called "an unprecedented and a clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system." Martin worked extensively on the legal and political effort to reverse Trump's defeat. Text messages obtained by TPM — including some which have not previously been reported — show how active Martin was with various elements of the "Stop The Steal" movement. 

"I'm organizing groups, set up a call for 1:30 today, doing another tomorrow," Martin wrote in a text message to Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on November 4, 2020, the day after the election. "I'm get the outside groups on the same page and activating them."

The exchange was among the 2,319 messages Meadows turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, which occurred as Trump supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol during the certification of the 2020 election results, halting the process. The messages show how there was a coordinated push to promote false claims of fraud in the election and to challenge the results in court and on the ground based on those lies. Officials at every level of government including multiple Trump appointees and other Republicans have said there was no major instance of fraud in the 2020 race.

TPM ran multiple stories based on the Meadows texts in 2022 and you can read more about the story behind these messages and our procedures for publishing them in the introduction to that series. The texts involving Martin that we are reporting here are being presented in their original format including spelling and grammatical errors. TPM was able to connect the phone number used for the messages to Martin through public records databases and campaign finance reports. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. 

At Johnson's event on Wednesday, Martin suggested the extremely rare phenomenon of non-citizen voting was a regular occurrence.

"It's already illegal for non citizens to vote, but just because something is illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen," Martin said. "We're trying to get ahead of the curve here."