With a week to go before the midterms, a group of Democratic senators are demanding that Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), share communications his department may have had with far-right groups promoting a baseless conspiracy theory about left-wing groups stealing votes from residents of nursing homes.
In July, Oz’s agency issued a memo rescinding previous guidance on how staff at nursing homes could help residents to vote by assisting with mail-in voting or transporting residents to polling locations. The memo replaced that guidance with threats of prosecution if staff “engage in inappropriate coercion or other violations of residents’ rights.” Referring to this memo, election denial groups last month began to boost claims that voter fraud was happening inside care facilities.
That campaign was spearheaded by the Election Integrity Network, a group led by Cleta Mitchell, a former adviser to president Donald Trump. “These left-wing groups go into the nursing homes, and they go into the group homes, and they basically steal the votes of these most vulnerable,” Mitchell said in a recent appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room show.
Now, citing WIRED’s reporting on the nursing home conspiracy theories, a group of senators including Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Alex Padilla, Mazie Hirono, Ron Wyden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jeff Merkley, and Cory Booker wrote in a letter to CMS to ”urgently request that CMS rescind its July 2026 memorandum and reinstate its 2020 and 2024 nursing home voting guidance.”
“This is as low as it gets,” Warren tells WIRED. “The Trump administration’s unfounded allegations of election fraud are inspiring election denial groups to harass nursing home residents and staff. With less than a week until Election Day, every lawmaker in America should be standing up for fair elections and pushing back on this attack on seniors’ voting rights.”
A CMS spokesperson did not respond to questions about the agency’s communications with election denial groups but instead referred WIRED to the July 2026 memo.
In the letter, Warren and her colleagues specifically ask Oz about communications between CMS and Mitchell, the Election Integrity Network, and Project Civica, a New York–based electron denial group. The senators demand Oz “identify each organization and individual involved, the dates and nature of those communications, and any recommendations provided to CMS.”
Mitchell, EIN, and Project Civica did not respond to a request for comment.
In August, Warren sent a letter to Oz questioning the July memo and asking him to reverse the changes. In September, Oz responded in a letter to Warren directly addressing the guidance that was removed from the CMS website in relation to helping nursing home residents with voting.
“Providing neutral logistical assistance, such as helping a resident request a mail-in ballot completing a ballot per the resident’s own expressed wishes, or arranging transportation to a polling location, is not the type of conduct that would give rise to a voter fraud investigation,” Oz writes.
Addressing the apparent contradiction in this response, the senators in their letter to Oz asked: “Why has CMS not reinstated its previous guidance clarifying nursing homes’ responsibilities to facilitate residents’ voting rights?”
With just days to go to the midterms, efforts to boost baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud continue to gain traction. On Tuesday, Trump said he is willing to accept the outcome of the midterms if they are “honest elections.” But his administration has spent months pushing conspiracy theories about mail-in voting and noncitizen voting, while actively trying to disenfranchise voters.
