The big lie of 2024: Illegal immigrant voting
Claiming that noncitizens are voting is the latest form of election denial.
There’s a semisatirical theorem, known as Godwin’s Law, which posits that if any online discourse goes on long enough, it inevitably leads to a Hitler or Nazi comparison. No professional pundit wants to be guilty of tripping this law.
Problem is, Donald Trump seems intent on making the Hitler comparison happen.
In recent weeks, the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) have ramped up their baseless claims about violent invasions from impure foreigners, echoing “blood and soil”-style rhetoric deployed nearly a century ago.
At a rally this past weekend in North Carolina, Trump declared that “a vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 million more illegal aliens will invade across our borders, stealing your money, stealing your jobs, stealing your life.” Chillingly, he added that migrants were already “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest.”
This followed earlier remarks in Arizona, in which he alleged that “young American girls” are “being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.”
Vance has likewise baselessly accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of not only butchering and eating people’s pets, but also of killing people. “Murders are up by 81 percent because of what Kamala Harris has allowed to happen in this small community,” Vance said on CNN.
The Clark County, Ohio, district attorney, a Republican, unequivocally refuted Vance’s claim, noting that local murder rates were higher under Trump. What’s more, across his 21 years in the prosecutor’s office, Daniel Driscoll said, “we have not had any murders involving the Haitian community — as either the victims or as the perpetrators of those murders.”
Even Godwin Law’s namesake, Mike Godwin, wrote in a Post op-ed last year that he agrees the Hitler analogy is not just apt but necessary. He cited Trump’s authoritarian instincts for consolidating state power in a single leader; dehumanizing political enemies as “vermin”; and claiming that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” an infamous Hitler talking point.
MAGA Republicans are already laying the groundwork for the 2024 edition of election denial. Their latest favorite election lie: Undocumented immigrants are being allowed to vote. If their candidate loses, they will blame illegally cast votes.
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This might sound familiar. Former president Donald Trump cooked up the excuse for losing the popular vote in 2016: Millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton!
Just as his “investigation” of that spurious accusation turned up no evidence of undocumented immigrants voting en masse, the absence of any evidence in case of their defeat in November probably will not stop Republicans from crying foul, filing specious legal challenges, refusing to certify results, claiming that the election was rigged and trying to overturn the results.
Undocumented immigrant voting has never been an actual problem. “On the heels of Trump’s first campaign for president in 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice examined about 23.5 million votes in 42 jurisdictions, looking for evidence of the illegal voting by noncitizens that Trump had claimed was prevalent,” Axios reported. “It found about 30 suspected illegal votes.” Likewise, the libertarian Cato Institute debunked a bogus study in 2020 attempting to show that large number of undocumented immigrants voted.
CNN has also debunked the noncitizen voting lie. “Decades of data” have demonstrated that existing rules are “very effective at stopping noncitizens from registering and voting in federal elections.” CNN reported:
“It happens almost never,” said David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Making something illegal doesn’t stop it from happening, but we know how often it happens, and it’s extremely rare. This is a problem that is very small. And it has almost always occurred because of a misunderstanding.”
The right-leaning Heritage Foundation’s database of confirmed fraud cases lists less than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than one billion lawfully cast ballots
Meanwhile, “numerous reports and studies have shown that instances of noncitizen voting in federal elections are extremely rare.”
Republicans apparently do not intend to let facts get in the way. The myth of illegal immigrant voting is back with a vengeance.
That will not stop the xenophobic election deniers. Even without data, MAGA election deniers may well seek to stall certification, citing some bogus study and/or concocting affidavits based on mere speculation. As we saw in 2020 — when Trump filed more than 60 lawsuits without substantiating instances of fraud — Trump may again try to sow doubt, implore his congressional allies to throw out electoral votes and even whip up another mob.
