Republicans this week announced a bill that would ban noncitizens from voting in federal elections. This bans things that are already illegal to address the problem of not being able to prove their existence.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told reporters this week frankly that Republicans are motivated by a hunch to push for another bill restricting Americans from voting.
“Everyone intuitively knows that many illegal aliens vote in federal elections. But that's not something that can be easily proven. We don't have that number. This law… , which will allow you to do just that. And if someone were to try to do that, it would be illegal in the state,” Johnson said on the steps of the Capitol. He said this at a press conference on Wednesday.
Federal law since 1996 has prohibited noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and many states have passed similar laws for local elections.
So Mr. Johnson's speech was a jarring admission for voting rights advocates who have data on non-citizen votes — numbers that show how minimal such cases are.
“The problem is that we actually have those numbers, and we know that noncitizens are not voting illegally in detectable numbers, much less in large numbers.” said Eliza Swearen Becker, Senior Counsel for Voting Rights and Elections. Brennan Justice Center Program. Pointed to a study that looked at data from 42 different jurisdictions.
“A Brennan Center study of the 2016 general election estimated that there were 30 cases of suspected unverified non-referendum votes out of 23.5 million votes cast, representing 0.0001 percent of the total votes cast. , the chairman's instincts are wrong,” she told The Hill.
This is a conclusion reached by the liberal Cato Institute, which one of its experts called the claim “one of the most frequent and least serious criticisms” of immigration.
Johnson's appeal to intuition struck a nerve with civil rights activists. Civil rights activists believe that illegal voting is not the problem, but a proxy for voter suppression against underserved communities.
“Intuition is of no use. I don't mean licking. And we need evidence. We need details. And what I would say is that a lot of our organizations are not trying to figure out whether to vote fraudulently or to qualify. “We are searching thoroughly for any evidence of votes cast by people who are not eligible. There is no evidence,” said Janet Murguia, president of UnidosUS, the country's largest Latino civil rights organization.
“So he can have as many intuitions as he wants, but that doesn't mean they're true. It doesn't mean there's evidence, it doesn't mean they're facts. To prove evidence of fraud, you have to have specific You need to check the data.”
Johnson first laid out the framework for the bill during a visit to Mar-a-Lago in April, shortly after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) threatened to vote to remove him from office. and announced it together with former President Trump.
“I think this is another way for him to appease the lunatics on the right, because he’s on the chopping block right now and he has to do something to give them red bait. “When I stood next to Trump, we watched him do it at Mar-a-Lago,” said Nanette Barragan (D-Calif.), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. .
House Democrats announced that Johnson, along with a number of Trump allies, including Stephen Miller, the architect of much of Trump's immigration policy, and Ken Cuccinelli, the former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security, announced the voter fraud bill. Just hours later, he joined with the Republican majority in a floor vote to save Johnson's job. , they helped implement them. Cleta Mitchell, who supported legal efforts to challenge the 2020 election results after President Trump lost, also attended.
The Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act) requires voters to prove their citizenship in order to vote.
These measures are often cited by voting rights advocates who worry that many people don't have passports or birth certificates on hand, that they are expensive to obtain, and that they create barriers to accessing the ballot box. is causing concern.
Swearenbecker said the Brennan Center found that 5 to 7 percent of Americans, or millions of people in total, do not have “the most common types of documents used to prove citizenship.” He said he did.
This is a barrier to states passing their own citizenship laws, many of which have since been defeated in court. The Kansas law has been in effect for three years and has suspended more than 22,000 people from voter rolls for failing to provide proof of citizenship. Courts have struck down the law along with similar plans in several other states, but a federal judge upheld Arizona's law in March after years of efforts to require proof of citizenship to vote.
“That's stupid. It's already illegal. They're trying to convey a message, a lie, to the American people that illegal aliens are voting. Now it's illegal to do that. Another Claim There's no need to create a book. It's already illegal,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.).
“This is just another time-waster that Republicans specialize in.”
“The most basic thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and destroy our republic is to “This bill is necessary because it undermines trust in the government,” he said. election. ”
“We should have documentation… We should have a system to ensure that only American citizens vote in federal elections,” he said.
But advocates have long argued that the system is already in place, and that research by right-wing groups proves it.
“We have certain right-wing groups, very conservative groups, that are heavily scrutinizing this area for the potential for illegal voting by ineligible people, especially undocumented people, and they 'We can't report anything,' if at all, in significant numbers,” Murguia said.
The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of “recent” cases of voter fraud, but some cases in its files date back to the 1980s, and under “ineligible voting,” the database includes cases of voting by noncitizens. Approximately 50 cases have been reported.
Many noncitizen voting cases involve visa holders or legal permanent residents rather than illegal immigrants.
In Florida, ahead of the 2014 midterm elections, then-Governor Rick Scott (Republican) announced plans to remove 180,000 foreign nationals from the voter rolls, but that number would first be reduced to 2,600. The list was later reduced to 198, and ultimately 85 names were removed from the list, leaving only one person indicted.
Unlike other crimes, where it is difficult to pinpoint the perpetrator, registering to vote and voting leaves a paper trail and is itself a crime.
Noncitizens who register to vote or take other actions falsely claiming to be citizens can be sentenced to up to five years in prison, and those who vote can be sentenced to up to one year in prison. There is sex.
Those who violate the law are subject to deportation and their chances of obtaining citizenship are in jeopardy.
Joseph Thurber, charged in the Florida voter purge, was sentenced to five months in prison, but the judge gave him a relatively short sentence considering Thurber would almost certainly be deported. .
“The effects are very serious, and this is not really a risk to anyone,” Swearenbecker said.
“And that intuition really shows in the numbers.”
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