‘Noncitizen voting’ is a lie | In Focus

Many Trump supporters believe that voting by illegal immigrants makes it necessary for President Trump and the DOJ to take control of national voting in all the states.

This administration is using the USPS to make sure that there is no mass illegal voting by mail-in ballots in the blue states justifies all the mid-decade redistricting, lawsuits and appeals to the Supreme Court.

Let’s examine this argument by learning how many illegal immigrants actually have voted using mail-in ballots, and whether this could tip the election in the Democrats’ favor.

Before we find out what the facts tell us, be aware: “It’s illegal for people who are not U.S. citizens to vote in federal or state elections. And the federal voter registration form asks registrants to affirm, under penalty of perjury, that they are eligible citizens. The form warns those who make false statements could be fined, imprisoned or deported. Non-citizens who register to vote can also lose the ability to ever become U.S. citizens” (“6 facts about false noncitizen voting claims and the election,” NPR).

The fear of non-citizens voting is based upon a false racist conspiracy theory called the “great replacement theory”. Conservatives have falsely claimed that Democrats have encouraged immigrants to cross the border so they will vote and replace (white) American voters. Former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson was one of the chief proponents of this lie.

With these potential penalties, are non-citizens going to risk voting? Would you if you were a non-citizen? Does that make any sense?

Even if a person is in this country illegally, why bring attention to yourself by voting, or by breaking the law for that matter? Illegal immigrants often took great risks to enter this country; their goal is to be law abiding and to keep as low a profile as they can. That’s how I would act as an illegal immigrant.

“The Washington Post reviewed a Heritage Foundation database of voter fraud cases and found 85 cases relating to allegations of noncitizens voting between 2002 and 2023.”

The Heritage Foundation is the organization that funded Project 2025, the hyper-conservative plan that President Trump followed closely in his first year of his second term. If such a conservative group could come up with such low numbers of illegal immigrants who voted, then this question of illegal immigrants voting is a solution in search of a problem.

So, why is this such a big push by President Trump? If even Republicans in the Senate won’t pass the SAVE AMERICA Act which requires proof of citizenship and identity to vote, then why is this such a big issue?

The act, if passed, would require women who changed their names when they married to go through a long, tedious, and expensive process to prove they were American citizens since their married names would not match their names on their birth certificates. This would affect 70% of married women. According to a recent survey: “Millions of eligible voters — about 1 in 10 adult U.S. citizens, according to one recent survey — don’t have ready access to documents that prove their citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, and would face hurdles to vote” (NPR).

Adolf Hitler in his book, Mein Kampf, written in prison in 1925, blamed the Jews for The Big Lie: “to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone ‘could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously’. Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany’s loss in World War I” (Wikipedia). Did you notice that Hitler blamed the Jews for a technique he himself used to convince the German nation to follow him?

Does this projection by twisting of the truth sound strangely up-to-date and familiar?

We are living in a time when gullible, well-meaning, but naive people are so loyal to a party and a belief system that they can’t discern truth from a lie. Constant repetition by authority figures, if it is loud enough and long enough, have convinced millions of Americans that our elections require proof of citizenship and identity to vote.

If this attempt to destroy mail-in voting succeeds because the corrupt Conservative Six in the Supreme Court backed up a lying president in his attempt to destroy our representative democracy, it can disenfranchise millions of eligible voters not just in Washington state (where nearly every registered voter gets their ballot by mail) but also rural communities around the country who rely on the post to participate in their democracy.

Thankfully, us Washingtonians can always go to a voting center to fill out a ballot, or even print one out from the computer to drop into a drop box.

But despite these alternatives, I expect a major election disruption would cause voter participation to tank — which is exactly what the current administration wants.