1/ John Johnson isn’t dead. Nor is Lillian Shuster. Or Stanley Ellis.
These 3 lifelong Florida voters are very much alive, healthy and ready to vote in November.
But somehow they ended up on the radar of a conservative nonprofit that claimed they had cast ballots from the grave.

2/ How did this happen?

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, or PILF, sent election officials in Palm Beach County, Florida, a list of voters who they claimed had cast ballots in recent elections despite having died years before.

Spooky.

3/ The group claimed those votes were evidence of widespread voter fraud in a county that will be critical to Democratic hopes next month.

But we checked PILF’s data, and we immediately found mistakes.

4/ In documents @weareoversight shared with us, we learned that the group's research easily falls apart under scrutiny.

One of those documents was a PILF spreadsheet from May 2019, sent to Palm Beach County elections officials.

5/ One of their key findings:
that 100 votes had been cast by dead people in recent years.
What we found:
No evidence that votes had been cast for dead people in Palm Beach County.
At least 56 instances of alleged voter fraud compiled by the group definitively disproved.

6/ PILF’s Palm Beach report is just the latest in a series of discredited analyses the organization has produced in its attempt to validate the myth that voter fraud is rampant in U.S. elections.

7/ In 2016 and 2017, the group published two reports, “Alien Invasion in Virginia” and “Alien Invasion II,” which named thousands of Virginians PILF claimed had voted despite being noncitizens.

8/ After U.S. citizens named in the report sued for defamation, PILF had to admit its analysis was wrong, retract large swaths of its report and apologize to the plaintiffs, all of whom were legitimate voters.

9/ Wait, there's more.

In May, @propublica discovered that PILF had made another false allegation, this time about more than a million absentee ballots the group claimed had gone missing in the 2018 midterms, a claim Trump touted in this tweet. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1256366878873792512

10/ It turned out that PILF had not only misreported federal data, but it had mischaracterized unreturned ballots – a common phenomenon, as many voters request them and then don’t vote – as “missing” and therefore susceptible to fraud.

11/ For more on how the conservative nonprofit made false claims about voter fraud in Florida, read @willcarless' story: https://revealnews.org/article/john-johnson-isnt-dead-how-claims-of-voter-fraud-in-florida-fell-apart/