Republican activists met on a Zoom call in July to discuss how to keep undocumented immigrants from voting in November, a problem they claim, inaccurately, to be a looming threat to a fair election. A party chair from Georgia, recommended scouring school enrollment figures to find neighborhoods with large numbers of migrants. A Detroit activist recommended hanging up signs in “ethnic” neighborhoods warning people not to vote if they were not eligible. She also suggested searching voter rolls for certain types of surnames. There is no indication that noncitizens are voting in large numbers. Yet the notion that they will flood the polls and vote overwhelmingly for Democrats is animating a network of Republicans who mobilized around former President Trump's claims of a rigged election in 2020, reports the New York Times.
Activists have ramped up pressure on local election officials to take steps that they say will keep noncitizens from tilting the election in Democrats’ favor. They have pressed for voter roll purges, filed lawsuits, prepared for on-the-ground monitoring of polling places and spread misinformation online. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced an investigation into whether organizations were purposely registering noncitizens to vote. Secretaries of state in Ohio and Montana are suing the Biden administration accusing officials of encouraging noncitizens to vote. In Congress, members of the House Freedom Caucus want to include a bill focused on noncitizen voters in a spending package this fall. “This narrative that noncitizens are voting is really an attack on voters of color and particularly Latino voters and new Americans,” said Hannah Fried of All Voting is Local, a voting rights group. State audits and studies from groups across the political spectrum have repeatedly found that a relatively small number of noncitizens make it onto voter rolls, and a far smaller number cast ballots. The Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, found that the number of votes cast by noncitizens discovered through state audits in 2016 ranged from three in Nevada, out of over a million votes cast, to 41 in North Carolina, where nearly five million votes were cast.
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