Former President Donald Trump has been making claims about voter fraud in the U.S. since before the 2020 election. Those unfounded claims are even related to some of the various legal issues he faces as he campaigns to be the GOP presidential candidate.
This year, Trump has been going harder on a different type of voter fraud narrative – one that’s been haunting the U.S. for more than a century. It plays on the fear of non-Americans voting.
According to a report from NPR, here’s a memo in circulation right now about the alleged “threat on non-citizen voting,” from Cleta Mitchell. She’s a former Trump adviser. Last September, The Intercept said that Mitchell was the leader of the “election denial movement.”
During an Iowa rally in January, Trump criticized President Joe Biden and his Democratic administration for allowing in migrants from the Southern border.
Migrant border crossings from Mexico hit a record high at the end of last year, according to government statistics cited by the Pew Research Center. However, it also said that numbers fell from 250,000 in December to 124,000 this January.
Trump told the crowd gathered in Iowa that he believes the Biden administration is allowing in migrants in to impact the upcoming election. It appears that he and the current president will have a rematch of the 2020 election this November.
“That’s why they are allowing these people to come in – people that don’t speak our language – they are signing them up to vote,” Trump said. “I believe that’s why you are having millions of people pour into our country and it could very well affect the next election. That’s why they are doing it.”
NPR noted that it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and that “numerous studies over the years have found that it almost never happens.”
According to Ron Hayduk, an expert on noncitizen voting at San Francisco State University quoted by the outlet, noncitizen voting was once common in the U.S. That changed following the Civil War, Reconstruction and a wave of immigration. In the 1800s, a myth that people were being shuttled into the country to influence elections began to emerge, said NPR.
“I’ve been hearing it my whole career,” said Kim Wyman, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. She’s also the former Republican secretary of state of Washington.
In 2012, the Immigration Policy Center wrote about “Chicken Little in the Voting Booth” in response to restrictive voting laws.
“Proponents of harsh voter laws often assert, without a shred of hard evidence, that hordes of immigrants are swaying election results by wheedling their way into the voting booth,” said the report. “However, repeated investigations over the years have found no indication that systematic vote fraud by non-citizens is anything other than the product of overactive imaginations.”
Just shy of a decade later, the Los Angeles Times reported about how a “racist myth has circulated around elections, often told in rich detail, of undocumented immigrants traveling poll to poll to vote illegally.”
Gilda Daniels, an election law professor at the University of Baltimore said narratives about voter fraud can create hysteria and further “this idea that only certain people should be allowed to participate in the process,” per NPR.
Gallup polling found last month that the percentage of Americans who named immigration as the most important issue facing the U.S.
shot up from 20% to 28% in just one month to become the most cited problem in the country. Claims about migrants being “imported” to the U.S. to vote were even retweeted on X by the site’s owner, Elon Musk.
“They are importing voters,” said the billionaire. “This is why groups on the far left fight so hard to stop voter ID requirements, under the absurd guise of protecting the right to vote.”
NPR said that the most recent resurgence of the myth is intended to push Congress to pass legislation that would require documentary proof of citizenship as part of voter registration.
“If you make [registering] harder, there will be students, young people, elderly people, poor people and other groupings of people who would just not bother,” said Daniels. “This whole document is [saying] we don’t want the [National Voter Registration Act] or any other piece of legislation to do what it's supposed to do, which is register people to vote.”
While the NVRA does not require proof of U.S. citizenship for people to register to vote, NPR said a federal voting law passed in 2002 required applicants to provide a unique identification number to register found on other documents that involve citizenship checks.