A Texas social worker faced 134 felony counts for registering nursing home residents to vote without their knowledge.
Trump's CMS just killed the Biden rule that made it easy – and Elizabeth Warren wants it back.
What she's demanding would put millions of dementia patients' ballots back in the hands of partisan activists.
Biden's Nursing Home Ballot Harvesting Rule Gave Partisan Activists Direct Access to Dementia Patients
On July 20, 2026, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz quietly did something Biden's team spent four years refusing to do.
He rescinded the Biden-era nursing home voting guidance – a directive that instructed long-term care facilities to actively recruit residents for absentee voting, coordinate with outside groups, and help register and cast ballots on residents' behalf.
The Biden version read like an invitation.
Nursing homes were told to arrange transportation to polling locations, facilitate mail-in voting, and open their doors to outside "volunteers" who could assist cognitively impaired residents with their ballots.
The new CMS memo flipped the script – warning facilities against "inappropriate coercion," citing criminal cases, and instructing staff not to register residents without their knowledge or complete ballots on residents' behalf without authorization.
That memo cited the Texas case directly.
A social worker at the Mexia State Supported Living Center had been charged with election fraud for registering residents without their consent.
In Wisconsin, Sheriff Christopher Schmaling investigated eight nursing home residents whose mental capacities had diminished – all of whom had cast mail-in ballots from Ridgewood Care Center.
The Wisconsin Assembly took it seriously enough to appoint a retired state Supreme Court justice as special counsel to investigate nursing home voting in the 2020 election.
What he found was damning.
Retired Justice Michael Gableman's report documented widespread instances of nursing home voter fraud, forgeries, and residents voting who had no capacity to consent – including one case caught on video where a family confirmed their loved one had been mentally incompetent for years.
The local prosecutor looked at the Wisconsin evidence and said his "hands are tied."
The residents whose ballots were cast without their knowledge never saw a single charge filed against anyone.
Warren and Padilla Are Demanding the Nursing Home Voter Fraud Rules Trump Just Killed Be Restored
Within weeks of the new CMS guidance, thirteen Senate Democrats swung into action.
Led by Elizabeth Warren and Alex Padilla, they fired off a letter to Dr. Oz demanding he immediately rescind the July memo and reinstate the Biden-era rules.
Their argument: the cases cited in the memo never produced fraudulent votes, so there's no real problem.
That logic should terrify anyone with a parent in assisted living.
The Texas social worker charged with 134 felony counts ultimately pleaded guilty to lesser charges – but only after investigators caught what she had done.
Those residents never came forward themselves.
They couldn't.
Magan McCreary spent years working in nursing homes across Texas, Connecticut, and Rhode Island before joining the Election Integrity Network.
She saw what the Biden guidance enabled firsthand.
"I've seen coercion from state volunteers saying 'this is how I would vote,'" McCreary told the Daily Signal. "I didn't stay at a facility after I saw social workers filling out ballots."
Warren and Padilla's letter accused the Trump administration of trying to intimidate nursing home staff – particularly immigrant workers – by referencing criminal cases.
Translation: don't investigate fraud, because the people committing it might be politically protected.
Heritage Foundation Just Armed Nursing Homes Against Ballot Harvesters
The Heritage Foundation's Election Transparency Initiative, led by former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, didn't wait for the Democrat backlash to blow over.
They released a compliance toolkit walking nursing home facilities through exactly how to implement the new CMS guidance – designating voting coordinators, protecting resident autonomy, and shutting down outside pressure campaigns before they start.
"People of the right mind can vote, but people who are incapable are rarely declared incapable; they are just cared for," Cuccinelli told the Daily Signal, "and that's when too often a liberal social worker might take advantage of them."
That one sentence explains everything the Democrat letter is trying to paper over.
Left-wing political operations that spent years building access to nursing home residents didn't build it to protect them.
They built it because cognitively impaired patients who can't object are the perfect captive voting bloc – and Biden's CMS handed them the keys.
Trump just changed the locks.
Thirteen Democrat senators are now demanding those keys back before the 2026 midterms are over.
Sources:
- Fred Lucas, "Ballot Harvesting Concerns in Nursing Homes Spur New Push to Protect Vulnerable Seniors," The Daily Signal, September 16, 2026.
- Joe Thomas, "Interview: Ken Cuccinelli Brings His Election Transparency Initiative to Heritage," The Daily Signal, July 28, 2026.
- "Wisconsin Probe Finds 2020 Election Riddled with Nursing Home Voting Fraud," The Washington Times, March 2, 2022.
- "New Election Review Details Vote Fraud at Nursing Homes," MacIver Institute, March 2, 2022.
- "Attorney General: Macomb County Nursing Home Employee Pleads Guilty in Attempted Election Fraud Case," Michigan Department of Attorney General, February 24, 2022.