Republicans Exploit Irregular Theories About Voting by Immigrants

Republicans Exploit Irregular Theories About Voting by Immigrants

Republicans Exploit Irregular Theories About Voting by Immigrants, Party attorneys, activists, and government representatives are banding together to launch a campaign against the alleged evil of foreign voters casting ballots. Voting rights activists claim the initiative is disseminating false information.

Although nothing indicates that noncitizens are voting in large numbers, the notion that they will flood the polls to vote for Democrats is animating a sprawling network of Republicans.Credit…Jim Vondruska for The New York Times

A group of Republican activists convened via Zoom call at the end of July to go over election preparations for November. The subject of discussion was how to prevent unauthorized immigrants from casting ballots in November, a situation they falsely assert poses a threat to an impartial election.

One woman, a Georgian local party chair, suggested searching school enrollment data to identify immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Another activist from the Detroit region, Darlene Hennessy, suggested posting posters in “ethnic” communities cautioning individuals not to cast ballots if they were ineligible. She also advised looking for particular surname kinds on voter rolls.

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According to a phone tape that The New York Times was able to get, Ms. Hennessy stated, “I think it’s unfortunate, but sometimes the only way you can find out is to look for ethnic names.”

She went on, “We don’t want to be doing anything illegal.”

There is no evidence that a sizable portion of voters are non-citizens. Nonetheless, the idea that they will pour money into the polls and win a Democratic majority is igniting a vast network of Republicans who organized behind the fabrications of former President Donald J. Trump’s allegations of election manipulation in 2020 and are gearing up for the next one.

Prominent attorneys, Republican lawmakers, right-wing influencers, activists like Ms. Hennessy, and other supporters of Mr. Trump have increased their pressure on local election officials to adopt actions they claim will prevent noncitizens from swaying the election in favor of the Democrats. They have prepared for in-person poll site monitoring, filed lawsuits, pushed for voter roll purges, and disseminated false information online.

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Elected Republicans have reacted. Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, recently declared that his office will look into if groups were intentionally enrolling noncitizens to vote. (As part of an inquiry into claims of voting fraud, he also gave the state police permission to examine the houses of activists who had been registering Latino voters.) According to news sources, the secretary of state in Alabama recently canceled the registrations of over 3,000 persons, some of whom are naturalized citizens, requiring them to correct their information before they may cast a ballot.

The secretaries of state of Montana and Ohio are suing the Biden administration, alleging that delegates are pressing foreign nationals to vote. Congressmen from the House Freedom Caucus have advocated for the addition of a noncitizen voter measure to a fall spending deal.

Voting rights campaigners and attorneys are raising a number of issues in response to this rise in participation. Discussions among the Republican activists echoed policies from the Jim Crow era that prevented Latino and Black voters from casting ballots. Voting rights supporters stated that although there is no proof of activists acting, if they did target communities with signs that would be in violation of laws against voter intimidation, they should be held accountable. Furthermore, if efforts to remove noncitizens from voter rolls are not carried out carefully, it may make it harder for citizens to vote lawfully.

Hannah Fried, the executive director of the voting rights organization All Voting is Local, stated, “This narrative that noncitizens are voting is really an attack on voters of color and particularly Latino voters and new Americans.”

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However, Ms. Fried and other supporters of voting rights recognized another danger: a number of those who raised the alarm about noncitizens casting ballots also spearheaded the effort to reverse Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020. Their emphasis on this storyline now poses a risk of increasing public mistrust of the electoral process and may be used as justification for challengers in the event that Mr. Trump loses once again.

Jessica Marsden, an attorney with Protect Democracy, an organization that tracks risks to free and fair elections, stated, “Since 2020, we’ve seen a sustained effort to foment distrust in our election system and election results, and I think this is another effort to do more of that work.”

Numerous state audits and investigations conducted by political parties have consistently revealed that the proportion of noncitizen voters who register to vote and who actually cast ballots is quite low. A new investigation by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute found that, of the millions of votes cast in 2016, the number of votes cast by noncitizens uncovered through state audits ranged from three in Nevada to 41 in North Carolina, where nearly five were found to have cast.