Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo has repeatedly been saying this week that Democrats have been pushing to register “massive lines of illegals” to vote in Texas. As it turns out, she never did any actual reporting on the topic.
The Texas Department of Public Safety debunked Bartiromo’s claims, with Sergeant William Lockridge, a spokesperson for the department, calling the claims “simply false” and “kind of racist” in a statement Tuesday to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Brady Gray, the chairman of the Parker County GOP, also said such reports were “erroneous” after investigating Bartiromo’s claims.
Bartiromo first brought up the alleged voter registration in an X post on Sunday, citing a “friend of mine’s wife.” It turns out that this was all the sourcing that the Fox anchor needed to repeat the claim ad nauseum on TV.
Fox doesn’t seem to care much about the egregious lapse in journalistic practice, with a network spokesperson telling Zeteo media columnist Jason Baragona that Bartiromo was citing one of her sources but never said that she confirmed the story. And, as if to excuse repeating a claim without any proof, the spokesperson added that Republicans have repeatedly mentioned noncitizens voting in recent months.
That seems to be the only true statement from either Bartiromo or Fox: Republicans keep repeating that undocumented immigrants or noncitizens are illegally voting in the U.S. Several members of Congress and Republican candidates repeated the false claim at the Republican National Convention, where it made its way into the party platform. House Speaker Mike Johnson has even proposed a bill to tackle it based on bogus data.
It’s pretty obvious that the GOP is using the claim to appear even tougher on immigration and garner more votes in November. But, they have yet to offer any proof, and right-wing media is following their lead. Perhaps Fox and other conservative media outlets should remember all of the hefty legal settlements they’ve had to pay for peddling false information, especially when it comes to elections.
