Mother Jones; Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/Getty; Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
At tonight’s debate, former President Donald Trump repeated baseless claims, increasingly popular among Republicans, that there is mass noncitizen voting in the United States. It has been a persistent theme of the campaign—one that combines two of Trump’s main recurring grievances: anti-immigrant sentiment and the Big Lie.
“Our elections are bad,” Trump said. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”
Noncitizen voting is a non-issue, despite Republicans’ best efforts to make it one. Some of it goes back to a debunked video. In late July, the Oversight Project—a self-described “legal and investigative” group linked to the Heritage Foundation that purports to be “battling corruption and weaponization”—promoted a video with supposed evidence of widespread cases of noncitizens admitting to being registered voters. Behind the camera, a man introduces himself to residents of an apartment complex in Norcross, Georgia, saying he works at a company that helps Hispanic people register to vote. He goes on to ask them if they’re US citizens or not, and a handful of respondents appear to confirm that they are noncitizens who are registered to vote.
In the video, Anthony Rubin—the founder of the right-wing Muckraker website known for pulling undercover stunts like infiltrating migrant caravans to denounce an “invasion” and exposing flyers allegedly calling on migrants at a border encampment to vote for Joe Biden—says 14 percent of noncitizens with whom they spoke admitted to being registered to vote, and then extrapolated that statewide to claim 47,000 noncitizens would be registered to vote in Georgia. “Based on our findings,” he concludes, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.” The video reached 56 million views on X, with a boost from Elon Musk, who has been spreading false claims about noncitizen voting and accusing Democrats of “importing voters.”
It turns out, these unfounded allegations of noncitizen voting can be—and have been—easily and exhaustively debunked.
As the New York Times recently reported, three of the seven people depicted in the video later provided context that contradicts the assertions made, saying they had either only told the man what they thought he wanted to hear to make him go away, or that they feared that by telling the truth, meaning that they weren’t registered to vote, they might be coerced to register and get in trouble with immigration authorities. Georgia investigators also found no evidence that those people had voter registrations, according to the Times.
A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of “suspected noncitizen voting” for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes. In 2020, the Cato Institute concluded that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.” Even the Heritage Foundation’s own data proves that the idea of massive noncitizen voting in the United States amounts to a long-lasting myth. An analysis by the American Immigration Council of Heritage’s database containing 1,546 instances of voter fraud found just 68 cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s. And only 10 of them involved undocumented immigrants.
Despite all the evidence, the GOP and right-wing activists continue to push conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting and are even proposing legislation barring noncitizens from voting in federal elections (which already is the law).
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said during a press conference earlier this year about the introduction of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE), a bill making it a requirement to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. “But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number.”
With Johnson now trying to attach the proposed legislation to a stopgap funding bill, Donald Trump suggested congressional Republicans should force a government shutdown if the effort is unsuccessful. “The Democrats are trying to ‘stuff’ voter registrations with illegal aliens,” he posted on Truth Social. “Don’t let it happen—Close it down!!!”
Critics of the SAVE Act say the legislation can only result in more voters of color and naturalized citizens being disenfranchised, pointing to the fact that millions of US citizens don’t have access to a passport or birth certificate to present as proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Moreover, states already have systems in place to verify the citizenship status of voters. “This bill would do nothing to safeguard our elections, but it would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls,” the White House said in a statement in July.
“In 2020, we heard wild stories of voting machines flipping votes, of boxes of ballots, of ballot paper that supposedly had bamboo fibers in it to prove it came from China,” Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said in a congressional testimony. “This year, we’re hearing the beginning of wild stories about widespread, huge numbers of noncitizens voting in federal elections.”
Why now?
“It’s being pushed preemptively, I believe, to set the stage for undermining the legitimacy of the 2024 election,” Waldman added. “This year, the ‘Big Lie’ is being pre-deployed.”
