House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks as former President Donald Trump listens throughout a information convention Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.

Wilfredo Lee/AP

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Wilfredo Lee/AP

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks as former President Donald Trump listens throughout a information convention Friday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.

Wilfredo Lee/AP

Former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., appeared collectively Friday to tout laws aimed toward stopping one thing that’s already unlawful in America: noncitizens voting in federal elections.

Johnson gave a broad overview of a invoice House Republicans will quickly introduce that will implement new citizenship documentation necessities for individuals to register to vote, which specialists have stated would make voting harder for many eligible voters like naturalized residents and younger voters.

“We cannot wait for widespread fraud to occur,” he stated at a information convention at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. “Especially when the threat of fraud is growing with every single illegal immigrant that crosses that [southern U.S.] border.”

The fable that immigrants are exerting undo affect on American elections has been floating round U.S. politics for greater than 100 years.

Individual states started banning noncitizens from voting greater than a century in the past, and Congress handed a regulation in 1996 that explicitly banned the follow in all federal elections.

Numerous studies have additionally confirmed that it virtually by no means occurs, however as extra conservative voters say immigration is a key concern for them, it is turn out to be clearer that election misinformation in 2024 will heart on the subject as nicely.

Last month, NPR acquired a two-page memo being circulated by conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell, a former adviser to Trump, that pushed plenty of false narratives round noncitizens voting. The doc centered totally on the implementation of a 1993 law that made registering to vote simpler, and Johnson talked about the regulation in his remarks Friday as nicely.

They each have additionally pushed the unfounded concept that the Biden administration is permitting migrants to cross the southern border for political acquire.

“We believe one of the reasons for this open border … is because they want to turn these people into voters,” Johnson stated, with out offering any proof.

Election officers confirm citizenship in different ways in different states, however federal regulation requires voters to supply a singular identification quantity once they register to vote and since that’s normally both a driver’s license or Social Security quantity, election officers can normally work with these companies to confirm citizenship standing.

“Most applicants use their [driver’s license] to register,” Tammy Patrick, a former native election official in Arizona who’s now the CEO of the nonprofit Election Center, wrote in an e-mail. “This number often serves as the validation of citizenship since most DMVs retain citizenship status in their databases.”

Experts say introducing laws, nonetheless, is a means for lawmakers to point to voters this concern is one thing to be involved about, at the same time as there’s by no means been proof to assist the concept noncitizens are voting at something aside from miniscule numbers.

Since 2020, 9 states have enacted new legal guidelines aiming to determine and take away noncitizens from their voter rolls, and laws is at the moment lively in 16 states, in keeping with the Voting Rights Lab.

“Perception is 9/10 of reality,” Ron Hayduk, an skilled on noncitizen voting at San Francisco State University, stated in an interview with NPR earlier this yr. “Putting the solution on the table suggests there was a problem. And I think that’s part of the point. [These laws] create a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, had his workplace carry out a citizenship audit in 2022 that discovered fewer than 2,000 suspected noncitizens registering to vote within the state over the prior 25 years. None have been truly in a position to solid a poll.

“Noncitizens are not voting in Georgia,” Raffensperger stated in a latest interview with NPR, although he did laud Johnson and Trump’s remarks Friday.

And a latest examine in Arizona (first reported by The Washington Post) discovered that lower than 1% of noncitizens try and register to vote, and even in these circumstances, the vast majority are considered errors.

Adding confusion to the difficulty, nonetheless, is the truth that a number of native jurisdictions have moved to permit noncitizens to vote in native elections. San Francisco, for example, permits resident noncitizen mother and father and guardians to vote in class board elections, and a few cities in Maryland and Vermont enable noncitizens to vote in municipal elections.

Election officers in these jurisdictions implement practices to verify these voters do not solid ballots in races they are not speculated to.

But Hayduk says even in locations the place noncitizens can legally vote, they often don’t. People he is interviewed about their expertise in these locations do not wish to threat their standing within the U.S. simply to solid a single poll — additional proof, in his eyes, that this is not an precise drawback.

“Time and time again in the interviews we did, we heard from immigrants who said they were super excited about this new law to allow them to vote, and it felt like it affirmed their voices. … But, you know, put themselves at risk? Not worth it,” Hayduk stated. “So clearly, they’re not going to do that for a federal election where there’s an explicit law passed in 1996 that would impose very serious felony crimes … and that would certainly lead to their detention and deportation.”