The conservative woman cracking down on conservative women

With the SAVE America Act before the Senate, a bill that could radically transform elections, Cleta Mitchell is approaching the apex of her influence. At the same time, the “election integrity” movement that she has often spearheaded, fueled by years of conspiracy theories about widespread non-citizen voting, may be about to turn on its own base: conservative voters.

Mitchell initially rose to prominence as a prominent denier of President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, participating in efforts to overturn the results and acting as one of the attorneys who helped assemble the Republican legal strategy in their failed attempt to help Trump cling to power.

Since then, Mitchell and other GOP activists have been organizing in the hopes of reshaping American elections in their image, most visibly via the SAVE America Act, which Trump and his allies have rallied behind, with Trump promising that the act would guarantee Republican victories for the next 50 years.

Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of American Oversight, a watchdog group that has followed Mitchell closely since 2020, told Salon that Mitchell has wielded a level of influence within the conservative and Republican legal infrastructure that she should have at least as much name recognition as characters like Mike Lindell and Sidney Powell, two notorious Trump allies and conservative activists whose influence has waned since 2020.

“I don’t think people can appreciate how she is very much the connective tissue to a lot of what we are seeing that has taken place,” Chukwu said. “She just took credit for pressuring to bring the SAVE Act to the floor because of the consistent pressure campaign that they’ve been mounting behind the scenes.”

The bill now before the Senate is a compilation of the various theories and grievances that Mitchell has propagated over the years and even successfully pushed in some Republican states, like North Carolina. Mitchell partnered with Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to bring the current bill before Congress.

The campaign for Mitchell, however, goes back much further to the turn of the century, when she cut her teeth defending Republican positions on the 2000 election. Since then, she has had her fingers in many of the various Republican causes, ranging from pushing to abolish the IRS to defending the National Rifle Association in court over alleged ties to Russia.

The apex of Mitchell’s relevance arguably came after Trump’s 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden. She helped plot to overturn the election results in court from her perch as chair of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group that has been active in litigation of election rules for more than a decade.

Mitchell was an infamous participant in Trump’s notorious call to Georgia Gov.  Brad Raffensperger in which Trump demanded that the governor “find 11,780 votes” in the state, which would have been just enough to deliver the state to Trump.

Mitchell’s role in the call and her other 2020 activism ultimately resulted in her stepping down from her partnership at  the Washington, D.C., office of Foley & Lardner, which she blamed on “a massive pressure campaign in the last several days mounted by leftist groups via social media and other means against me, my law firm and clients of the law firm.”

Since then, Mitchell has been working to push through changes to election rules. In the North Carolina example, the Mitchell-backed legislation moved up the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots to three days after election day, extended the deadline for challenging mail-in ballots to five days after election day and gave permission to poll workers to eavesdrop on voters’ conversations.

Another of Mitchell’s projects, the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, has also provided conservative activists with a framework for pushing Republicans to adopt the Trumpian view of the 2020 election and the myth of widespread non-citizen voting, with the group claiming that there are more than “21.7 million potential non-citizen voters.”

According to Chukwu, Mitchell has been one of the leaders in pushing the phantom issue of non-citizen voting to the fore in conservative politics, pushing Republicans to talk about the issue and pressuring state legislators to support bills that ostensibly address the problem.

“The myth of non-citizen voting has been around for a while, but it didn’t really start to take shape until 2016, when then candidate Trump began to repeat these allegations that there were many non-citizens voting,” Chukwu said. “But even at that time, it didn’t take on the life that it has until today, until 2020.”

At the same time, Mitchell was a leader in the campaign to get states to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center, commonly known as ERIC, a bipartisan data-sharing system used by states to help keep voter rolls current. Under pressure from Mitchell and her allies, Florida, West Virginia, Missouri, Ohio and Iowa all pulled out of ERIC in 2023, with activists pushing for the adoption of Eagle AI to fill the void.

Eagle AI, however, acts more as a voter registration challenge tool than an information-sharing tool for states and pulls from lesser data sets than ERIC and is funded by conservative dark money groups.

Mitchell also founded the Election Integrity Network, an affiliate of the influential Conservative Partnership Institute, which created a network for like-minded activists to organise in their states and maintains chapters in politically important states like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

This all happened during a period when Mitchell began “flexing her muscle and really expanding her influence, because she essentially aligned herself with a lot of dark money groups and conservative think tanks,” Chukwu said.

Other state-level efforts have been pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, another group Mitchell has worked with to pressure GOP lawmakers into supporting her proposed electoral changes. The watchdog group Documented reported that during one December 2024 meeting, Mitchell distributed the “Voters’ Election Integrity Bill of Rights,” which proposed many of the changes seen in the SAVE America Act now.

Such changes included the elimination of ballot curing, which allows voters to fix problems with their ballots after casting them, heavy restrictions on mail-in voting, and closer collaboration between states and the federal government in the policing of voter rolls, among other changes. The bill of rights also supported the sort of proof of citizenship requirements seen in the SAVE America Act, which would essentially require voters to produce either a birth certificate or a passport when registering to vote, and is one of the main burdens imposed on voters by the bill.

Mitchell’s work on the SAVE America Act, however, dates back at least to the beginning of 2024, according to comments she made on a World Prayer Network podcast earlier this month, in which she claimed that immigrants were part of some Democrat scheme to win elections.

“I really felt God put on my heart in January of 2024 that we really needed to raise the alarm about all these illegals who had been admitted into our country by the Biden administration and what role the Democratic power structure had in mind for illegals to play in terms of getting them to be registered on the voter rolls so that either they could vote for those people or so that once they got them on the rolls they could basically steal their votes,” Mitchell said. “That’s the kind of thing that actually does happen.”

Elsewhere, Mitchell has claimed that the only reason anyone would oppose the SAVE America Act is if they plan on committing election fraud.

“These people are corrupt; they want to cheat. There’s only one reason that you don’t want to have proof of citizenship to register to vote,” Mitchell told The Marc Cox Morning Show.

People who have closely examined the bill, however, say that there are other reasons why Republican lawmakers might only have tepid support for the bill, and why some, like Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, even oppose the bill.

The SAVE America Act is the “stop the steal” movement, cutting off its nose to spite its face, according to Gréta Bedekovics, the director for democracy at the Center for American Progress.

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Bedekovics described Mitchell in an interview as a “notorious election denier” and conspiracy theorist on a years-long crusade to pass the SAVE America Act. She also said that Mitchell and her allies have, in some ways, lost the plot in terms of supporting reforms that would further give advantage to Republicans in future elections. While the provisions in the SAVE America Act will put up roadblocks for millions of voters, some of the provisions, specifically the proof of citizenship requirements, might actually disproportionately impact Republican voters.

“We look at passport ownership rates and red, rural state residents are far less likely to have them. Specifically, Republican voters are less likely to have them. Again, married women tend to lean more Republican as a group. Within that subset, even more Republican women tend to change their names more. On many fronts, Republicans would actually be disadvantaged,” Bedekovics said. “Mail voter registration, online voter registration, those are critical for rural voters.”

Mitchell has responded to some of these points, dismissing concerns over the effect on married women by asserting that Democrats must not know many women who have changed their names. Bedekovics said that the assumptions seemingly driving support for the SAVE Act, however, are well out of date.

“Cleta Mitchell and people promoting the SAVE [America] Act have continued to operate under the assumption that if you make it harder to vote, that’s going to disenfranchise Democrats,” Bedekovics said. “But I think you’ve seen that their party voting patterns have really changed in the last couple of election cycles as well, and that kind of thing is incredibly outdated, and they’re really not digging deep into the facts to see who will actually be impacted.”

Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment from Salon.

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