Could illegal votes swing the election?
No evidence backs Trump’s claim on coordinated effort
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump maintains his incendiary attacks on the legitimacy of the election, one of his favorite themes has been the claim that the results will be tainted by the votes of millions of people in the country illegally.
“They are letting people pour into the country so they can go ahead and vote,” he said this month, in a meeting with the head of the union representing border patrol agents.
“And believe me, there’s a lot going on,” Trump said at a rally. “People that have died 10 years ago are still voting. Illegal immigrants are voting.”
Part of the Republicanled crackdown on supposed voter fraud, battles over measures to guard against noncitizen voters have percolated for years in election offices, state legislatures and federal courtrooms.
Records in these fights show that small numbers of noncitizens do end up registered, and a few have cast votes. However, no one has uncovered evidence of thousands of noncitizen voters — and no evidence has emerged to support Trump’s theory of a coordinated effort to throw an election by stuffing the voting rolls with ineligible immigrants.
“What we have seen are errors,” said Dale Ho, director of the voting rights project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s not a horde of people trying to break into this country so they can vote.”
The rule on voting eligibility is simple: Except for a handful of cities that permit noncitizens to vote in local elections, everyone who casts a vote in America is supposed to be a citizen, either by birth or by naturalization. And although the distinction is sometimes lost in the loud debates over undocumented immigration, even green-card holders, who are legal permanent residents, also are ineligible to vote until they become citizens.
In most places in the U.S., the question is handled solely on the honor system. When people register to vote, they check a box attesting that they are U.S. citizens. Election administrators verify identity by looking at driver’s license or Social Security numbers, for example, but under federal guidelines, they may not ask for proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport.
Four states — Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and Kansas — have passed their own citizenship verification rules, but those requirements have been tangled up for years in lawsuits by progressive and voting rights groups, who argue that they present an unfair burden on minority voters.
Alabama and Georgia haven’t been enforcing their requirements, but in the other two states, the fights over proving citizenship have led to unusual results. Arizona now recognizes a second class of voters — 6,328 for this election — who can vote for federal offices, like president, but not for the governor or other state offices, because they haven’t provided proof of citizenship.
This month, a federal appeals court forced Kansas to accept the registrations of people who had signed up to vote at motor vehicle offices, without providing proof of citizenship. Emergency notices were mailed to these voters, telling them to “PLEASE DISREGARD” warnings that they weren’t eligible to vote.
But state officials still consider nearly 9,000 others, because they signed up using Kansas’ own form, ineligible to vote in this election unless they come up with citizenship proof by Election Day, Nov. 8.
Another case on a similar issue is still pending in federal court in Washington, D.C.
J. Christian Adams is among the leaders of the conservative push for more citizenship checks. While working at the civil rights section of the Department of Justice, he filed a voter intimidation case against two members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia.
Now president of the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation, Adams has pushed this year for measures to find and purge noncitizens from the voting rolls.
As one step, he’s sought to show that it’s too easy for noncitizens to register to vote. Eight Virginia counties provided records showing that more than 1,000 people had been removed from the rolls since 2011 because they were not citizens, the foundation said. In Philadelphia, a city that has been a focus of Trump’s warnings of potential election fraud, 86 people were removed from the rolls after they turned out not to be citizens, and 40 of them voted at least once.
“These are only the people who are caught,” Adams said. “It frightens me to think what the actual number is in Virginia.”
In any case, experts say, it’s unlikely that anyone could find enough noncitizens on the voter rolls to challenge the results in a presidential election.