Donald Trump’s Claim The fact that non-citizens are crossing the southern border to register to vote in U.S. elections has become a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Even though every major study has found that non-citizen voting is extremely rare.
but A lawsuit filed last month shows that false claims of voter fraud are causing real-life instances of eligible voters being unable to cast their ballots.
On August 13, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, an election fraudster who supported Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results, announced that his office had identified 3,200 people believed to be non-citizens registered to vote in the state and that they be They announced that they would begin purging voters from the register. . He said the names were: Retrieved from a list of individuals who have received a non-citizen identification number from the Department of Homeland Security. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that “it is likely that some people who are issued non-citizen identification numbers will then become naturalized citizens and be eligible to vote.”
On September 27, the Justice Department sued the state of Alabama, alleging that Allen’s actions violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which prohibits voters from being removed from the rolls within 90 days of an election. “Mitigate the risk that errors in systematic list maintenance may disenfranchise, confuse, or deter voters by ensuring that eligible voters have adequate time to resolve the errors and understand their rights,” the Justice Department said in the lawsuit. “There is a so-called quiet period.” .
But the timing of the purge wasn’t the only problem. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), of the 3,251 identified non-citizens in Alabama, 717 verified their citizenship and subsequently re-registered to vote. You end up on the list of Secretary of State. This means that the 11th-hour voter purge had an error rate of over 22%. The Justice Department said that in Alabama, “hundreds or even thousands of registered eligible voters could potentially remain inactive, harmed and at risk of being disenfranchised just weeks before the upcoming federal election.”
The crackdown on alleged non-citizen voters is often due to the sloppy methodology of partisan election officials that leaves naturalized U.S. citizens and even those who were citizens at birth in trouble. William Pritchett, of Montgomery County, told NPR he recently received a letter from the state informing him that his registration would be revoked, even though he was born in Alabama and has always been a U.S. citizen.
In 2019, Texas attempted to remove nearly 100,000 non-citizens from its voter rolls. Trump argued the state’s claim. The list proved that “voter fraud is rampant.” But election officials quickly discovered that many of the non-citizens supposedly targeted for deportation were actually naturalized U.S. citizens. A federal judge halted the purge, the Republican secretary of state was forced to resign, and his campaign manager admitted in legislative testimony that 25,000 American citizens had been wrongly targeted.
The Texas incident should have been a cautionary tale. But Trump and his allies continue to double down on their outright lies and accelerate their voter suppression efforts, even though they have yet to find any evidence, even if minimal, of non-citizen voting or registration.
furthermore, The Republican-controlled Congress introduced a bill in eight states this November that would allow only U.S. citizens to vote in state elections. It’s already law, but these ballot initiatives would further Trump’s lies about voter fraud and lay the groundwork for future voting access restrictions that could hinder eligible voters, such as requiring proof of citizenship such as a passport or birth certificate to register. It can be arranged. vote And the conservative group Look Ahead America just posted billboards of a man in handcuffs in Arizona and Nevada. “If you are not a citizen, voting is a crime.” This could intimidate legal voters in Latino communities, suggesting they may be confused when they come to vote and that this could also impact undocumented relatives.
The Republican Party is pushing for this. They are using these tactics despite their continued failure to uncover widespread instances of voter fraud. The Election Integrity Commission, which was formed by President Trump after he claimed that he lost the popular vote in 2016 due to 3 million illegal votes, was disbanded without finding any evidence of voter fraud. Recently in North Carolina election committee Last month, it announced the removal of 750,000 ineligible registrations from the state’s voter rolls starting in early 2023, mostly because people have moved, died or did not vote in recent elections. But in this major investigation, the commission found only nine potential non-citizens registered to vote out of the state’s 7.7 million voters.
