Subverting 2024, part one: deceive

How election deniers are lying about “noncitizen voting”

It’s happening again. 

Just like in the 2020 election, when conspiracies about mail-in voting and faulty voting machines fueled efforts to overturn the results through political, legal, and ultimately violent means, more lies about voter fraud are being spread as a pretext for election deniers to discard the 2024 results.

“Noncitizen voters” are the scapegoat this time around, and spreading these deceitful narratives is the first step toward election subversion.

Protect Democracy’s new analysis on 2024 Election Subversion Strategies (and how to defuse them) explains how these lies are designed to sow doubt about how elections are run, encourage election deniers to interfere in the voting process, and, ultimately, prevent a rightful winner from becoming president. This is the first of a three-part series to explain these steps: Deceive, Disrupt, Deny.

One thing is markedly different about 2024, though. The false narratives started earlier and with more enthusiasm from the highest levels of the Republican Party. 

To compare, in October 2020, voter fraud conspiracies were underway, but what became the election denialist movement was not organized until after Election Day. But now, in October 2024, Donald Trump is openly voicing these lies, the Republican National Committee has preemptively filed dozens of “zombie lawsuits” that can be resurrected after the election to cause chaos, and Republican governors and members of the House and Senate are stoking fears that the election is going to be “rigged” again. Key actors are already aligned on their deceptive messaging on a much earlier timetable.

The claim that is getting the most attention now is that noncitizens will vote and sway the election. Here are some other examples of what their shared narrative sounds like:

• "Our elections are bad. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English, they don't know even know what country they're in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that's why they're allowing them to come into our country." – Trump at the ABC presidential debate, September 2024

• “We know that states are not requesting proof of citizenship and people check that box … so there’s going to be thousands upon thousands of non-citizens voting. If you have enough non-citizens participating in some of these swing areas, you can change the outcome of the election in the majority.” – GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson in an interview with Politico, October 2024

• “It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in our elections. Yet time and again, we have seen Democrat officials oppose basic safeguards and dismantle election integrity provisions, intentionally opening the door to non-citizen voting in our elections. This is just the latest step in our fight to compel officials to follow the law: only Americans should decide American elections, and Democrats will be held accountable.”– Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley in a letter to election officials in eight states, August 2024

Such statements are deceitful to voters for a few reasons. 

First, there is no evidence. Just as many bad-faith actors promoted conspiracies about 2020 voter fraud with no evidence, there is no evidence illegal voting is being encouraged or enabled in this election. 

Past efforts to uncover illegal noncitizen voting schemes have only identified a tiny handful of statistically insignificant attempts. For example, the Heritage Foundation, which continues to spread disinformation on this topic, compiled data that found only 24 instances of noncitizens voting in the 20 years between 2003 and 2023. Trump’s first-term Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, filled with his handpicked members and co-chaired by then-Vice President Mike Pence, was abruptly disbanded after finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud. 

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, officials in Texas and Florida allocated significant resources to root out illegal voting but have also come up short.

Second, noncitizen voting in state and federal elections is illegal. We have strong laws that bar noncitizens from voting in federal and state elections, and those laws come with stiff penalties. These laws include the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996. Noncitizens can be deported or denied citizenship and immigration benefits if they violate these laws. Illegally voting in a federal election would be an extremely high-risk, low-reward action for a noncitizen to commit.

Third, election officials must verify citizenship to vote in federal and state elections or risk punishment themselves. The NVRA requires states to use a common voter registration form that requires an applicant to attest he or she is a U.S. citizen under penalty of perjury. Citizenship information is verified using data from agencies like the Social Security Administration or state-specific departments of motor vehicles to ensure the information is valid. Federal law also requires states to conduct regular voter roll maintenance and remove ineligible voters. Agencies such as the Department of Justice and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission enforce list maintenance practices under the NVRA.  

Fourth, these claims of noncitizens on voter rolls are misleading, raised on a questionable timetable, do not equate to widespread noncitizen voting, and have already harmed the right to vote for U.S. citizens. Federal law requires states to conduct regular voter roll maintenance because people move, die, or are convicted of felonies daily. Routine maintenance updates records and catches errors to keep the rolls as accurate as possible. However, the law restricts systematic voter roll changes 90 days before an election to prevent people from being disenfranchised. (The Department of Justice’s guidance on this is available here.)

Knowing this is the law, a wave of officials in Republican-led states recently began raising claims about finding potentially illegal voters on the rolls. They did so within the 90-day “quiet period” window rather than earlier in the year when systematic changes can be made. In late August, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose claimed to have found 1,930 and 138, respectively, potential noncitizens with voting history. (It’s worth calculating: Even if these claims were confirmed, this would represent at most 0.00011% of votes cast in Texas and 0.00002% in Ohio, based on the current numbers of registered voters there.) 

Abbot and other Texas officials made similar claims in 2019 that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. At that time, the secretary of state’s office stated it had identified thousands of noncitizen voters with a voting history. The Texas Tribune reported that “Texas’ assertions didn’t hold up” because “many of the flagged registered voters turned out to be naturalized citizens whom the state incorrectly identified as ineligible because it was using outdated DPS data from driver’s license and state identification card applications.” The Texas Tribune report also found that the recent noncitizen voting figures Abbott has promoted are unreliable, as his office has at various times hedged the number as “potential” noncitizens voters, grossly inflated figures, and included “people removed from the rolls who failed to respond to letters alerting them that there were questions about their citizenship.”

This isn’t only happening in Texas and Ohio. Similar claims of noncitizens on the voter rolls were raised in Alabama and then became a pretext for a voter purge that affected natural-born lifelong Alabamians, as well as recently naturalized citizens legally entitled to vote. (A Trump-appointed judge temporarily halted this purge with an order issued on October 16.)

While these deceitful narratives about noncitizen voting are attracting the most attention, other troublesome lies with deep roots in conspiracy theories that emerged during the last election are also being amplified. These narratives often take the form of distorted stories about easily resolved clerical issues and unsubstantiated disinformation about voting machines. 

More on this is detailed in our full 2024 Election Subversion Strategies analysis. 

The important thing to know is that while the details of these conspiracy theories may differ, the purpose of telling them is the same: to deceive voters, provide an excuse to disrupt voting processes, and deny a rightful winner from taking office. 

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The next edition of our Subversion 2024 series will dive into Step Two in the 2024 Election Subversion Strategies: Disrupt.

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