September 20 :
In a series of lawsuits that democracy activists claim are intended to sow distrust, Donald Trump and his Republican allies are ramping up accusations that the U.S. presidential election on November 5 could be impacted by large-scale voting by non-citizens. Voter registration methods in four of the seven states that might determine Trump's or Vice President Kamala Harris's election have been the subject of at least eight challenges.
A broad challenge to Arizona voters' citizenship status is part of the legal effort that Trump and his allies claim is defending the integrity of the election. However, according to legal experts, their court filings fail to provide sufficient evidence of a phenomenon that is too unusual to impact election outcomes, as shown by independent studies.
"The former president is attempting to repeat his strategy from his previous three campaigns—establishing this 'If I win, the election is valid and if I lose, the election was rigged' narrative," stated Democratic New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver. In 2000, Trump had a brief run for the Reform Party, in addition to his subsequent presidential campaigns. A Republican National Committee spokeswoman responded to a question about Trump's campaign by saying, "We believe our lawsuits will stop non-citizen voting, which threatens American votes."
Independent research has demonstrated that non-citizens seldom, if ever, cast ballots in federal elections, and doing so is a crime. Some who support Trump's approach argue that even a single vote cast in violation of the law is unacceptable.
Last week, Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose testified before a congressional subcommittee, stating that while illegal voting is rare, enforcement is essential to ensure that it remains that way. According to him, out of a total of over 8 million registrations on the state's voter records, nearly 600 are not citizens.
We discovered 135 voters this year. Another 400 people were on the voter registration list but hadn't cast their ballots as of yet. Why is it even being considered unlawful at this point? Aircraft hijacking is a crime, yet the TSA will remain in place, LaRose remarked. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found that out of 23.5 million ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election, just 30 occurred—or 0.0001% of the total—in regard to Trump's fabricated allegations of extensive non-citizen voting.
A new guidance from the U.S. Justice Department warned states that large-scale adjustments to voter rolls or purges targeting particular classes of voters, such recently naturalized Americans, are both prohibited by federal law and cannot be made within 90 days of an election.
Democracy advocates argue that this fact demonstrates that Trump and his allies are not aiming to change the electorate in a big way through these lawsuits, but rather to set themselves up for challenging individual state results in court and by attempting to influence elected officials to do the same if they lose.
"Citizens who are not citizens on voter registration registers should not be subject to legal action. The nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, which advocates for election security and fairness, has senior counsel Dax Goldstein who stated that these actions are part of a weaponized public relations campaign aimed at undermining faith in elections.
Even if national surveys, including the Reuters/Ipsos survey, show that Trump is slightly ahead of Harris, the seven states where the race is most closely contested—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—are all close races. If Harris's victory were to hinge on only a couple of states, the outcome of the election may be turned around if Trump were to successfully contest a defeat in those states.
The re-election of Republican Representative Anthony D'Esposito, who is running in a close New York district, is a matter of "dozens or hundreds of votes," as he put it. "If one person that is not an American citizen has the ability to vote in our election, there is a serious problem."
The actions of state and county election processes are the primary targets of the lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, the affiliated America First Legal Foundation, and Republican state attorneys general. The officials involved are accused of not doing enough to prevent non-citizens from registering or being included on voter rolls. According to Rick Hasen, an expert on election law and a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, the attorneys representing these clients should use more cautious language when addressing these matters than Trump and his associates do.
"The public messaging is aimed at trying to convince the Republican base that Democrats are trying to steal elections and there's a lot of fraud," he added. "Once you get to court, you are subject to the rules of court, and I think you see lawyers being a lot more circumspect."
A campaign involving more than 60 lawsuits and the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump's supporters was an unsuccessful attempt to reverse his 2020 defeat to Democratic President Joe Biden. Due to problems with evidence and other factors, nearly every lawsuit that Trump and his associates brought in 2020 was rejected.
Four lawsuits filed this year in states like Texas, Kansas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania allege that a federal program launched by the Biden administration in 2021 to encourage voter registration is an attempt to partisanly register people who are likely to vote for Democrats. X last month featured remarks from Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state and current chair of the America First Policy Institute's Center for Election Integrity. Blackwell claimed that the Biden administration was plotting a "attempt to weaponize federal agencies into a leftwing election operation that opens the doors to non-citizen voting."
While nine Republican state attorneys general filed a 41-page lawsuit in federal court in Kansas, the sole mention of illegal immigrants voting is an allegation that the Biden administration neglected to investigate the possibility that "illegal aliens" would attempt to register to vote.
The North Carolina state Republican Party and the Republican National Committee have twice taken legal action against the North Carolina electoral board, claiming that non-citizens cast ballots. According to the cases, roughly 225,000 voters (or 3% of the total) were registered without proper documents and the state did not remove individuals who declared themselves non-citizens when they reported for jury service from the voter lists.
Despite having a Democratic governor (Roy Cooper), two Republican senators, and a Republican-controlled legislature, the state's delegation to the United States House of Representatives is evenly divided. Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the state elections board, announced that the agency had found nine registered voters who had falsely claimed non-citizen status, thus fulfilling the jury duty requirement.
Gannon stated that if the nine individuals' citizenship status cannot be verified, they will be requested to rescind their registrations. However, he also mentioned that the state is unable to remove them off the lists at this late stage before the election. Accusations of a defective registration form were the subject of the second case, which Gannon claimed "vastly overstates any alleged problems."
America First Legal, an advocacy group allied with Trump, has filed a lawsuit in Arizona in an effort to compel counties to conduct more investigations into the 44,000 voters (or approximately 1% of the total) who were permitted to register without presenting proof of citizenship.
The contentious issue is on the state's dual voter registration system, which does not demand evidence of U.S. citizenship for federal elections but does for state elections. Voting by non-citizens does not threaten municipal elections, according to even some long-time political operations in Arizona. According to Chuck Coughlin, a political consultant from Phoenix who became an independent in 2017 after having been registered as a Republican for his entire life, "It's not happening." "It's a MAGA narrative intended to gaslight Republicans about election integrity."
