California City Passes Anti-Voting Measure Based on Election Conspiracy Group’s False Data

A resolution passed last week by Huntington Beach, California uses false data from the election conspiracy group Unite4Freedom to stoke baseless fears about the integrity of elections. 

The measure underscores how nearly five years after the Big Lie, conspiracy-driven anti-voting groups have made inroads at the state and local level, where they are working to infiltrate election administration in order to take steps that tighten voting rules and legitimize their false claims. 

The Huntington Beach resolution, which passed unanimously, aims to “ensure a legally valid and transparent 2026 General Election” by empowering election officials to withhold the ballots of voters whose U.S. citizenship is in question, enforce strict chain-of-custody protocols and “investigate and resolve, or if necessary, re-administer any election that cannot be proven accurate and compliant,” among other provisions.

The resolution is vague on what specific enforcement actions the council could take. But it  empowers election officials to ensure election transparency, and cites false data from Unite4Freedom claiming mass voter fraud in California during the 2024 general election. 

“The irregularities in the official records of the 2024 General Election call into question the validity of the election, threatening the guaranteed protection of our natural rights under a republican form of government,” the resolution reads. “This emergency inflicts immeasurable harm upon our families, our way of life, and the fabric of these United States. It raises the specter of false representation in US Congress and state governments — an allegation that election officials are currently unable to disprove.”

Before the council voted on the resolution, an unnamed volunteer for Unite4Freedom reportedly gave a presentation on voter fraud in Orange County — where Huntington Beach is located — in the 2024 election. The presentation claimed that just over 20% of the county’s ballots were unverifiable.

Unite4Freedom, previously known as United Sovereign Americans, formed last year and quickly gained attention for filing a slew of lawsuits challenging states’ voter roll maintenance procedures. Among the outlandish, false claims promoted in the group’s lawsuits: that there were at least 1.4 million ineligible voters in Colorado in the 2024 election, and that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has not verified more than 57 million voter data records

Bob Page, the Registrar of Voters for Orange County, said in an email to Democracy Docket that the data is not accurate.

“Their claim that about 20% of voters are non-existent or not eligible does not align with Orange County Registrar of Voters data that shows 99.9% of the 1.9 million active registered voters in Orange County have provided proof of identity in order to vote in federal elections,” Page wrote. 

Page also told Democracy Docket that he repeatedly requested a copy of Unite4Freedom’s full audit on the 2024 general election in Orange County so that he could compare their findings and methodology with his office’s data — but the group has ignored his requests.

Joe Hoft, a prominent anti-voting conspiracy theorist and co-founder of The Gateway Pundit who works with Unite4Freedom, told Page in an email reviewed by Democracy Docket that Unite4Freedom refused to share their work with Page’s office because of concerns that his team “will not understand the work perform [sic] or the analysis accomplished.” 

In another email exchange, Hoft wrote that the delay in providing Page’s office with a copy of Unite4Freedom’s election audit is “due to our disbelief that your intention to get to the truth is legitimate.”

Despite the Huntington Beach council’s unanimous support for the resolution — along with the city’s mayor, Pat Burns, who brought forth the resolution — some Huntington Beach residents questioned the need.

“Please don’t waste any more of the taxpayer’s money on frivolous nonsense,” one resident wrote in an emailed comment to the council, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I read this agenda item and was looking for the background materials to understand the need for this, but there was none. There was only Mayor Burns’ statement agreeing with unfounded numbers stated by a biased organization.”

The resolution is the latest anti-voting measure advanced by Huntington Beach in recent years. Voters approved a strict voter ID ballot measure last year, which was successfully challenged by the state. Michael Gates, the city’s attorney who defended the voter ID law, was appointed to be the deputy assistant attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in the Trump administration.

Huntington Beach is hardly the only place where fringe conspiracy theorists have sought to gain an influence over local election administration. In Fulton County, Georgia, for example, two election deniers with ties to the anti-voting groups Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, were recently appointed to the board of elections — despite the governing board voting against their appointment.