Republicans are pushing legislation to crack down on noncitizen voting, which is rare and already illegal in federal elections, in a move that reinforces former President Donald J. Trump's efforts to delegitimize the 2024 results as he loses.
This week, Republicans in the House of Representatives plan to vote on a bill that would roll back a District of Columbia law allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, which they say is necessary to prevent Democrats from expand practice to other legal areas. And they're introducing a new measure that would require states to obtain proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when registering a person to vote.
The legislation has virtually no chance of becoming law, but does serve to strengthen one of Trump's favorite preemptive claims about election fraud. It also underscores Republicans' embrace of a baseless narrative reflects the racist conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement.” – that Democrats are deliberately allowing migrants to flow illegally into the United States to dilute the voting power of American citizens and secure election victories for themselves.
Speaker Mike Johnson recently appeared with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the former president's Florida resort and residence, to announce a pledge to crack down on migrants streaming across the border, suggesting that they entered unchecked without any evidence. of a plot to vote for President Biden.
“There is currently an unprecedented and clear danger to the integrity of our election system – and that is the threat of non-citizens and illegal aliens voting in our elections,” Mr. Johnson warned during a news conference on the steps of the Capitol. this month.
But he admitted he had no evidence to support that claim.
“We all know intuitively that many illegal aliens vote in federal elections, but it's not something that's easy to prove,” Mr. Johnson said. “We don't have that number.”
In fact, the estimates are known and they are extremely low; A national survey revealed the number of non-residents suspected of voting at the polls The 2016 election was about 30.
“They never present any evidence of actual fraudulent attempts by non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections,” said Representative Joseph D. Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the government committee. “So I think it's clear pretty quickly that this is all a pretext. They are going to question the outcome of the election again and they must have a reason for that.”
Fears that noncitizens would vote in U.S. elections date back to the 19th century, but have reached a fever pitch during the Trump era. Shortly after taking office in 2017, Mr. Trump met with congressional leaders at the White House and falsely claimed that he would have won the popular vote over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had it not been for three to five million illegal immigrants who had voted for her. .
After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, there was so little evidence that noncitizens voted that he and his allies largely avoided the topic as they pushed to overturn the election results. Instead, they filed numerous other complaints, including the use of drop boxes and mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic. They also pushed debunked conspiracy theories, including hacked voting machines, the dead voting en masse, and Italian satellites and Chinese-rigged thermostats flipping votes.
After falsely highlighting the risk of illegal voting by noncitizens in previous elections, Republicans say this time is different. They argue that so many undocumented immigrants have entered the country that the odds have increased, and that even a minuscule number of illegal votes could trigger a presidential election.
The bill will be voted on this week, sponsored by Representative August Pfluger, Republican of Texas, would repeal a 2022 DC law allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections. A number of municipalities, including cities in Maryland and California, allow non-residents to participate in local elections, particularly for the school board, where their children attend school.
Rep. Bryan Steil, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Administrative Committee, warned at a recent hearing that the practice could spread. He pointed to A programming problem in Pennsylvania that allowed non-residents to register to vote and a review thereof found more than 100 non-residents on Ohio's voter rolls.
“American elections are for American citizens, and we want to keep it that way,” Steil said.
Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democrat who is DC's non-voting delegate, argues that Congress should not interfere in DC's local affairs.
Republicans are also moving forward this week with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, sponsored by Rep. Chip Roy, Republican of Texas and an influential leader of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus.
Mr. Roy's bill would require states to personally obtain proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when registering someone to vote, and require states to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls.
“Secure elections are an important cornerstone for any representative government; without them we have no country,” Mr Roy said in a statement. “Radical progressive Democrats know this and are using open-border policies while also attacking election integrity laws to fundamentally reshape America.”
Democrats argue that requiring voters to register in person and provide a birth certificate or passport — something that many Americans, especially teens or younger adults, do not have readily available — simply makes it harder for citizens to vote.
Nearly 40 percent of the adult voting population did not vote in the last presidential election, and Mr. Morelle argued that further roadblocks would only make it harder for Americans to participate.
“It's just another way to keep people from voting,” Mr. Morelle said of the Republican legislation. “I mean, they just keep suppressing people's ability to vote.”
Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who famously rejected Mr. Trump's demands to overturn the results of the 2020 election in his state, has found common ground with Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson about banning non-citizens from voting.
“Since taking office in 2019, I have urged Congress to take action to change federal law and ensure that noncitizens cannot vote in our elections,” he said in a statement. “I thank Speaker Johnson and the former president for following my lead, and I look forward to finally seeing action in Congress.”
But David Becker, the director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said cases of noncitizens voting in federal elections were very rare and he suspected Republicans had ulterior motives.
“Imagine someone who has risked everything to be in the United States, or gone through the process of being here legally, risking their status by turning a bright spotlight on themselves and shooting themselves a bull's-eye to to cast one vote. in an election where 160 million votes will be cast,” he said. “It's not happening.”
Mr. Becker said the federal government and states, including Georgia, already had good policies in place to prevent this.
“This is largely being done, along with other forms of disinformation, to prepare the United States for the argument that elections have been stolen by people who apparently believe that the candidate they support is likely to lose,” Becker said.