Non-citizens don’t vote—but that’s not what really concerns Republicans.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/maga-elect ... just-voter
I would just add that there are those who will say, "If it's already illegal, what's the harm in 'redundant legislation'?"DONALD TRUMP’S DEBATE ASSERTION that migrants are eating abducted household pets was a whopper—but it may not be the most pernicious lie his campaign is peddling this election. The campaign and its allies consistently claim that if the former president loses in November, it will be because noncitizens are voting by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. As Trump lawyer Alina Habba put it recently, Democrats “can’t win lawfully,” so they are flooding “illegal aliens into this country,” ostensibly to elect Kamala Harris.
It is a recurrent and insidious theme—and one that Republicans have been making for years. When Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 (despite winning the Electoral College) he claimed 3-5 million votes were cast by people in the country illegally in states like California. More recently, he asserted that he would have won reliably blue states “if Jesus came down and was the vote counter.”
Now, Republicans are once again warning that noncitizens will determine the outcome unless Congress acts to prevent them—never mind that it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. At Trump’s insistence, House Speaker Mike Johnson has tried to tie government funding, which runs out September 30, to a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Not even all Republicans were keen on the plan—which could provide hurdles for their own base, many of whom are older voters who don’t have passports or birth certificates handy—so Johnson withdrew a combined government-funding/voter-ID bill on Wednesday.
What actual evidence is there that noncitizens vote in U.S. elections? The Heritage Foundation has established a database to track prosecutions for illegal voting since 1979, but a recent search shows only 85 cases of noncitizens voting out of about 2 billion votes cast between 2002 and 2023. That hasn’t stopped Heritage from alleging the problem is rampant, however.
The “Oversight Project,” part of the foundation’s so-called voter integrity effort, recently claimed there is “staggering evidence” that 14 percent of Georgia’s electorate will be noncitizens this November. The proof? The group hired undercover crews with hidden cameras to visit heavily Hispanic neighborhoods in Georgia and ask—in Spanish—those they suspected weren’t citizens if they were registered to vote.
It’s clear from watching the videos that most people just wanted to get rid of the annoying interviewers, who claimed to represent a group registering Hispanic voters. It reminds me of what you say when someone knocks on your door asking for contributions to a charity or trying to sell a subscription to a magazine: “I already gave at the office” or “I’m a current subscriber.” Some of those captured by hidden cameras simply said “yes” when asked if they were registered to vote. One even claimed to have already voted even though early voting in Georgia doesn’t begin until October 15. But the unsuspecting immigrants weren’t asked whether they were citizens until after they’d tried to brush off the questioner by saying they were already registered.
In a lengthy exposé of the dishonest scheme, the New York Times reported that none of the seven people who’d said they were registered actually were, according to an investigation by the office of Georgia’s secretary of state following the posting of the video. Indeed, a spokesman for the office called the Heritage effort “a stunt,” according to the Times.
Voting in federal elections by noncitizens is punishable by fines and imprisonment for up to a year and deportation if the person is also undocumented. Nonetheless, Republicans continue to push for redundant legislation to deal with a negligible problem. States, too, bar voting by noncitizens—though that wasn’t always the case. As Arturo Castellanos Canales points out in a fact sheet for the National Immigration forum, until 1924, when Missouri passed the last state law barring noncitizens from voting in state elections, “Granting the right to vote to noncitizens was a common incentive among U.S. territories and new states to attract workers and families to work and populate the lands.”
Still, a handful of municipalities do allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, including Takoma Park, Maryland. New York City’s provision to do the same was struck down as unconstitutional by a state appeals court earlier this year. While the consensus position that only U.S. citizens should vote in any elections seems to be the best policy, the Constitution is silent on the matter.
Citizenship comes with responsibilities—to serve on juries, for example—but its chief privilege is the right to choose who will lead the country, whether at the local, state, or federal level. All of us lucky enough to be born here automatically earn that privilege, but so do lawful immigrants who naturalize after living at least five years in the United States, learning English, and passing a test about our history and laws.
Phony drives to uncover noncitizen voting fraud may end up disenfranchising citizen voters instead by intimidating both naturalized immigrants and their fellow ethnics who were born here and are entitled to vote. The real lawbreaker here may be those whose moves look less like promoting voter integrity than voter intimidation. And that may be the real point. A recent effort by Texas state attorney general Ken Paxton to ferret out “voter fraud” was aimed at campaigns to increase Hispanic voting in the state. Lidia Martinez, whose home Paxton’s office raided in search of fraud, remarked, “This is a free country. This is not Russia.” Now the nation’s oldest Hispanic civil rights organization, LULAC, is calling on the DOJ to launch its own investigation into Paxton’s actions.
Several red states have already passed laws targeting voter outreach groups, levying fines and criminal penalties for assisting voters. The real election interference this November will not come from ineligible voters casting ballots, but from Trump and his allies who want to deter U.S. citizens from voting.
The events in and relating to Springfield (OH) show exactly the harm: the legislation might be "redundant" for purposes of preventing illegal voting, but perhaps it is not redundant at all as a vehicle for leveraging the power of the state against people some might wrongly argue are, I dunno, illegal migrants as opposed to legal immigrants.
