House Republicans are pushing legislation to suppress non-citizen voting as part of an effort to sow doubt about the election outcome and target immigrants who they say have no business participating in elections. in the United States.
They are planning to pass a bill this week that would repeal a Washington, D.C. law that allows non-citizen residents of the nation’s capital to vote in local elections. And they are advancing legislation that would require states to obtain proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, in person when registering an individual to vote, and would require states to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls.
Neither is likely to pass the Democratic-led Senate or be signed by President Biden, but both are ways for Republicans to draw attention to their false claims of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens.
Former President Donald J. Trump has long asserted, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that presidential and congressional elections are susceptible to widespread voter fraud and illegal voting by undocumented immigrants that skewed the results in favor of Democrats – an accusation which House Republicans have echoed.
Here are the facts about non-citizen voting and the false claims that foreign citizens swing close elections in one party’s favor.
More than a dozen cities and towns across the country allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.
There has long been a political debate in the United States over whether voting rights should be granted at the municipal level to foreign citizens regardless of immigration status, given that most of them pay comparable levels of taxes to U.S. citizens, contribute to your local economies and send your children to local schools.
Residents with foreign passports can vote for mayor, school board, city council and commissioner candidates in at least 14 municipalities whose state constitutions do not explicitly prohibit noncitizens from voting in local contests. Almost all of the cities are in the deep blue states of Maryland, Vermont and California.
Most local measures giving noncitizens access to voting face legal challenges. One such law in San Francisco, which survived a legal challenge, allows undocumented parents to vote for public school board members. But in 2022, the New York State Supreme Court struck down a New York City law that granted partial voting rights to more than 800,000 noncitizens.
Noncitizens rarely vote in local elections, even when they are allowed to do so. In Washington, D.C., where about 15% of the 700,000 residents are foreign-born, only about 500 noncitizens had registered to vote as of Monday, according to data provided by the District of Columbia Board of Elections. The district has more than 400,000 registered voters.
It is illegal – and extremely rare – for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.
Although noncitizens can vote in some local elections, they are prohibited by law from voting in federal elections for president or Congress, and research shows this almost never happens.
A study by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice analyzed 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 presidential election in more than 40 jurisdictions and found just 30 incidents of potential non-citizen voting – or 0.0001 percent of the votes cast.
A 2022 Georgia state audit reached a similar conclusion after finding fewer than 1,700 cases of noncitizens trying to register to vote in the previous 25 years. None of them were allowed to vote.
David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said states were “very effective” in ensuring that only U.S. citizens remained on the voter rolls for federal elections. This is largely due to the Real ID law, which requires states to verify residents’ immigration or citizenship status before issuing an official identification card.
“There has never been so much transparency around these elections, and that is verifiable,” Becker said. “There are very, very few people for whom citizenship status cannot be confirmed.”
Noncitizens have major disincentives to vote in federal elections.
Registering to vote attracts the highest level of scrutiny from state officials and law enforcement, something undocumented immigrants or those whose legal status in the United States is unstable are unlikely to want.
Those who have studied the issue say that immigrants have every reason to avoid attracting attention in this way. Voting illegally is a crime that can carry a prison sentence, fine and deportation.
If a noncitizen “is caught registering to vote or voting — it’s actually a citizenship exam issue — they will be deported,” Becker said.
Republicans and election deniers have cited incorrect numbers to suggest that illegal voting by noncitizens is widespread.
A witness at a House hearing last week on election integrity cited a flawed 2020 report suggesting that about 15 percent of noncitizens routinely vote in federal elections. The estimate, which election deniers often refer to, is based on a previous study whose survey data appeared to indicate that a significant portion of foreign citizens voted in 2008.
But those numbers are the result of an unscientific choice in a survey of just 20,000 people designed for a different purpose, said Walter Olson, senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank. A closer look at the survey results shows that the majority of respondents who claimed to be foreign citizens and who voted in the past were, in fact, American citizens who incorrectly chose the wrong answer to the citizenship question.
