Christian Smith
The Republican Party introduced a bill last week to prevent noncitizens from voting in federal elections — banning something that’s already illegal to solve a problem that lawmakers can’t prove exists.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was candid last week in telling reporters that Republicans are motivated by intuition in seeking another law that would limit voting to U.S. citizens.
“We all know, intuitively, that many illegals are voting in federal elections. But it is not something easily demonstrable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that – it will prevent that from happening. And if anyone tries to do that, it will now be illegal within the states,” Johnson said at a news conference Wednesday on the steps of the Capitol.
Federal law since 1996 prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and many states have passed laws that do the same in local elections.
So Johnson’s speech was a shocking admission to voting rights advocates who have the data on noncitizen voting — numbers that show how minimal such cases are.
“Well, the thing is, we actually have the numbers and we know that noncitizens don’t vote illegally in detectable numbers, let alone large numbers,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel for the Voting Rights & Elections Program at the Brennan Center. for Justice, pointing to a study that analyzes data from 42 different jurisdictions.
“The Brennan Center study of the 2016 general election showed an estimated 30 incidents of suspicious – unconfirmed – non-citizen votes out of 23.5 million, representing 0.0001 percent of votes cast. Therefore, the Speaker’s intuition is incorrect,” she told The Hill.
This is a conclusion that was also reached by the libertarian Cato Institute, with one of its experts calling out the demands one of the “most frequent and least serious criticisms” related to migration.
Johnson’s appeal to intuition touched a nerve among civil rights advocates, who view illegal voting as a non-issue and as a tool to enact voter suppression against disadvantaged communities.
“Intuition counts for nothing – it means nothing. And we need proof. We need details. And I can tell you that many of our organizations have looked for any signs of irregular voting or voting by unqualified people. There simply wasn’t any evidence,” said Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS, the country’s largest Latino civil rights organization.
“So he can have intuition all he wants, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. This does not mean there is evidence and it does not mean it is factual. We need to see specifics, data that proves any evidence of irregularities.”
Johnson first outlined the bill’s structure on a trip to Mar-a-Lago in April, making the announcement alongside former President Trump shortly after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) threatened a vote to remove him.
“I think this is another way for him to appease the right-wing crazies, because he’s in danger right now and he needs to do something to feed them red-bait, and we saw him do that when he was standing next to Trump in Mar-a- Lago,” said Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Nanette Díaz Barragán (D-Calif.).
House Democrats joined most Republicans in saving Johnson’s job in a floor vote just hours after he unveiled the voter fraud project alongside several Trump allies, including Stephen Miller, the architect of many of Trump’s immigration policies, and former acting Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli. , who helped to realize them. Cleta Mitchell, who helped Trump’s legal efforts to challenge the 2020 election results after his defeat, was also in attendance.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE Act, would require voters to demonstrate that they are citizens in order to vote.
Such measures have frequently raised concerns among voting rights advocates, who fear that many citizens do not have passports or birth certificates on hand, documents that can be expensive to obtain and create barriers to accessing the polls.
Sweren-Becker said the Brennan Center found that among 5 percent and 7 percent of Americans, numbering millions, do not have “the most common types of documents used to prove citizenship.”
It’s a barrier that has emerged as states pass their own citizenship proof laws — many of which have already been struck down in court. A three-year-old Kansas law has resulted in more than 22,000 people being suspended from the voter rolls after failing to provide proof of citizenship. Courts struck down that law along with similar plans in several other states, although in March a federal judge upheld an Arizona law after a multi-year effort to require proof of citizenship to vote.
“It’s stupid. It’s already illegal. They’re trying to create a message – a lie – to the American people that undocumented people are voting. It’s illegal to do that now. They don’t need to do another count. It’s already illegal,” said the Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.).
“It’s just another waste of time that the Republican Party is specializing in.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), one of the lead authors of the legislation, said Wednesday that it is necessary because “the most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and destroy our republic is to undermine the faith in our elections.”
“We should have documentary evidence. … We should have a system to ensure that only United States citizens vote in federal elections,” he said.
But advocates have long maintained that the system already exists and say research by right-wing organizations proves it.
“We have organizations that have been, you know, right-wing organizations, very conservative organizations, that scrutinize this area for any potential illegal voting by anyone who is unqualified, especially undocumented, and they simply cannot report any large number , if any,” said Murguía.
The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of what it calls “recent” cases of voter fraud, although some cases in the archive date back to the 1980s. In the “ineligible voting” category, the database reports about 50 cases of voting by noncitizens.
Among non-citizen voting cases, many involve visa holders or legal permanent residents rather than people living in the country illegally.
In front of the 2014 Florida midterm elections, then governor. Rick Scott (R) announced a program to purge 180,000 foreign nationals from the voter rolls, but that number was first reduced to 2,600, then 198, until 85 names were removed from the voter rolls and only one person was prosecuted.
Unlike other crimes where it can be difficult to identify the culprit, voter registration and voting create the documentary trail that is the crime in itself.
Noncitizens who register to vote or take other action to falsely claim they are citizens can face up to five years in prison, and those who vote can be imprisoned for up to one year.
Those who violate the law also face deportation and jeopardize any chances of obtaining citizenship.
The man prosecuted in the Florida voter purge, Josef Sever, was sentenced to five months in prison, a relatively short sentence handed down by the judge considering that Sever would almost certainly be deported.
“The consequences are so serious that really no one would risk it,” Sweren-Becker said.
“And this intuition is really confirmed in the numbers.”
