Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo has said repeatedly this week that Democrats in Texas want to register “huge lines of illegal immigrants” to vote. As it turns out, she has never actually reported on the issue.
The Texas Department of Public Safety refuted Bartiromo’s claims. Sergeant William Lockridge, a spokesman for the department, called the allegations false in a statement Tuesday to the Fort Worth Star-TelegramBrady Gray, the chairman of the Parker County Republican Party, also said after investigating Bartiromo’s claims that such reports were “erroneous.”
Bartiromo first mentioned the alleged voter registration claim in an X-post on Sunday, citing the “wife of a friend of mine.” As it turns out, that was all the sources the Fox host needed to repeat the claim on television ad nauseam.
Fox doesn’t seem to care much about the glaring journalistic error. A spokesperson for the network told Zeteo Media columnist Jason Baragona that Bartiromo cited one of their sources but never said she confirmed the story. And as an excuse for repeating a claim without any evidence, the spokesperson added that Republicans have repeatedly mentioned non-citizens voting in recent months.
This seems to be the only true statement from Bartiromo or Fox: Republicans keep repeating that illegal immigrants or noncitizens in the US are voting illegally. Several congressmen and Republican candidates repeated the false claim at the Republican National Convention, where it found its way into the party platform. House Speaker Mike Johnson has even proposed a bill to combat this based on fake data.
It’s pretty obvious that Republicans are using this claim to crack down even harder on immigration and win more votes in November. But they haven’t provided any evidence so far, and the right-wing media is following suit. Maybe Fox and other conservative media should remember all the hefty settlements they’ve had to pay for spreading false information, especially when it comes to elections.
