Noncitizen voting is already illegal in federal elections. Here’s why Republicans are still pushing the issue.
After the 2020 presidential election, the Trump campaign hired Ken Block, a data analyst and expert in voter data, to investigate and prove that voter fraud had occurred.
“I had no idea then how finding so little would lead to so much,” Block said in a press release promoting his new book, “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.”
Block’s account is only part of the ample evidence and research that shows that voter fraud was virtually nonexistent. Yet Republicans are obsessed with the myth — and they’re doing it because it serves multiple purposes for them and for Donald Trump.
Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson joined fellow GOP members of Congress to announce the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require those registering to vote in federal elections to show proof of US citizenship.
Never mind that for nearly 30 years, noncitizens have been explicitly banned from voting in federal elections.
Nor are Republicans entirely ignoring the lack of data to support their claims. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number,” Johnson said during the press conference. “This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states.”
How convenient and unoriginal it is to use intuition to ignore facts. “The speaker said that this question is unanswerable and relied on his intuition, but in fact, the question is very answerable,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel in the Voting Rights & Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview. “And it’s been answered many times, in that there is not a serious problem with noncitizen voting in the United States.”
The reality is that the latest attempt by Republicans to zero in on undocumented immigrants who allegedly vote when they can’t serves at least four political purposes for themselves and Trump.
First, national poll after national poll has shown that voters are ranking immigration as their top issue, above inflation or the economy more broadly. It is a foregone conclusion that Republicans believe that criminalizing immigrants — inciting baseless fearmongering around the influx of migrants at the Southern border — will pay off in the November elections.
As The New York Times’s Jazmine Ulloa recently reported: “It was not so long ago that the term invasion had been mostly relegated to the margins of the national immigration debate. … But now, the word has become a staple of Republican immigration rhetoric.”
So the SAVE Act is just another way for the GOP and Trump to keep the vilification of immigrants front and center during the presidential campaign.
Second, focusing on noncitizen voting also lays the groundwork for a potential attempt at delegitimizing the November election should President Biden win. It’s a way to preemptively assert that voter fraud will occur. Indeed, casting doubt on the election is a fundamental part of the Trump playbook, which takes me to my third point: Beating the illegal voting drum also gives Trump cover to continue the decidedly debunked allegation that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Republicans have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars “trying to prove that there is a problem of noncitizen voting and they continue to come up empty time and time again,” Sweren-Becker said. Block, the data expert hired by Trump, was reportedly paid $800,000 for his work. But that’s not all — The Washington Post reported last year that the Trump campaign spent an additional $1 million to find electoral fraud, but none was found.
“The fact that so many people have invested so many resources and don’t have the evidence to back up their claims should indicate to all of us that those claims are false” and that policy proposals like the SAVE Act are “hammers in search of a nail,” Sweren-Becker said.
Lastly, perpetuating the myth of illegal noncitizen voting may also discourage eligible Americans from casting their ballots. “The rhetoric is intended to cast doubt upon the integrity of our elections,” Sweren-Becker said. The SAVE Act is just another GOP-led effort “to make it harder at every step of the process.” For instance, research has shown that voter identification requirements represent a barrier to voting and disproportionately burden minority communities.
Make no mistake, that’s the ultimate coup for Republicans: To suppress legal voting.
Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.
