SID: Hey, everybody. This is Sid (ph) from Wichita, Kan. I have been an immigrant for 16 years, and I’m just about to take the oath of allegiance to become a United States citizen. This is such an incredible privilege and one that I hope never to take for granted. This podcast was recorded at…
ASMA KHALID, HOST:
1:14 p.m., Eastern time on Thursday, September 12 of 2024.
SID: If the last month is anything to go by, there’s almost no chance that things will not have changed by the time you hear this. But one thing is for certain, I will be voting in the next general election. Enjoy the show.
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KHALID: Well, congratulations.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Yeah, welcome to the democratic process, baby.
KHALID: (Laughter) Hey, there, it’s THE NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.
PARKS: I’m Miles Parks. I cover voting.
KHALID: And we are joined today by our colleague, Jude Joffe-Block. She’s been covering issues around democracy, looking into how false narratives spread and affect our country. Hey, there, Jude. It is such an honor to have you with us.
JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK, BYLINE: Thank you for having me.
KHALID: And I’m glad you are with us because today on the show, we’re going to be talking about voting, specifically the unfounded claims that noncitizens are voting in droves in congressional and presidential elections. It is a claim that has been percolating for a while, and Tuesday night, during that ABC News presidential debate, it came up again.
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DONALD TRUMP: 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 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.
KHALID: Is important to repeat here that there is no evidence to support Donald Trump’s claim there. But let’s zoom out and begin with the 30,000-foot view. Miles, are noncitizens voting in U.S. elections?
PARKS: Not in anything but microscopic, teeny-tiny numbers. I mean, nothing that any election official I’ve ever talked to had said would impact elections. You know, there have been so many studies about this issue. I should say at the top here, Asma, that this is not a new conspiracy theory in voting. You know, I did a story earlier this year that looked at the history of this claim. It goes back to the 1800s.
KHALID: Oh, wow.
PARKS: People who have been kind of pushing this idea that immigrants are going to impact our election system. And there have been so many studies on this. The one I go back to, there was a really big one from the Brennan Center for Justice after the 2016 election. They looked at 42 election jurisdictions, including some of the jurisdictions that have the highest number of noncitizens in the country, and they found suspected noncitizens’ votes, of the 23.5 million votes they looked at, made up roughly potentially 30 votes in those places.
Every study has confirmed this. The Cato Institute, which is right-leaning and has written a lot about this, says the same thing. Georgia, a couple of years ago, did an audit on their elections, and they found no noncitizens voting and just less than 2,000 even tried to register over the last 25 years. And so this has just been looked at so many different times and been found to be a nonissue, though I should say, a few localities across the country do allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, and that kind of confuses things here, but they are not allowed anywhere in the country to vote, for instance, for president.
KHALID: So explain this to us, Miles in terms of how voter registration actually works. I mean, especially because states are the ones handling this, and as you indicated there just a moment ago, there are certain localities where, at a local level, noncitizens may be allowed to vote.
PARKS: Yeah. This can get a little bit confusing because when you actually look at a national voter registration card, the only thing that talks about citizenship on there is there is a little check mark box where you check it, and it says, under penalty of perjury, it says specifically that you could potentially go to jail or be deported if you lie about this. Do you attest that you are a citizen? And so that gives some people the feeling that this is the only check and balance that makes sure that there’s not millions and millions of noncitizens on voter rolls.
But when you talk to election officials, they always note that what doesn’t get noted on this is that voters, when they register, are required, if you have a driver’s license or a Social Security number, to use that number to register. And these are government agencies that do ask for proof of citizenship. And so there are checks and balances that make sure there’s not just, like, millions and millions of noncitizens on the voter rolls, but that doesn’t really get fully understood when you hear a lot of conspiracy theorizing about this issue.
KHALID: And yet, we are seeing some Republicans argue that there needs to be further validation, that there needs to be some sort of proof of citizenship to vote. What’s happening there, Jude?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Right. So they’re saying that documentary proof of citizenship should be required to register to vote. That would be like a passport or a birth certificate, and they have created the SAVE Act, which would require that. And that act would have been tied to the bill to fund the government, but that effort actually seems to be on hold for now in Congress because Democrats are opposed to it.
KHALID: And, Jude, you have found that some of these enforcement actions that Republicans are arguing for are having an impact on voters now, people who are already registered to vote and, in fact, some cases, people who are citizens.
JOFFE-BLOCK: So with so much discussion about the potential for noncitizens, voting, we’re seeing a handful of states sending out communications to voters, which are having a really confusing effect on voters. So for example, in Alabama, like, 3,200 people got a letter saying they’re suspected of being noncitizens, and in order to vote, they need to update their registration, that they’re being moved to inactive. U.S.-born citizens, naturalized citizens, got this letter as well.
Later, the secretary of state clarified that people could vote on election day even if they’d gotten this letter, if they would show their driver’s license or give a Social Security number, but that wasn’t included in the letter. And these kinds of communications have led to a lot of confusion. Something similar happened in Tennessee as well.
PARKS: You know, I think it’s really interesting. One of the kind of pieces of evidence that many Republican secretaries of state have tried to put forward, that this is a problem we need to be focusing on, is we’ve seen a number of news releases in the last few years where a Republican secretary of state will come out and say, we looked at our voter rolls, and we found the potential for 3,600 or a few hundred or a few thousand noncitizens on our voter rolls.
But when you talk to election experts, this is almost always completely flawed statistical analysis because usually, what’s happening, just for voters who may be coming into this information to understand, is when you take the DMV database, where people have gotten driver’s license, some people might be saying, well, you can get a driver’s license if you’re a noncitizen. And that is true. And so the DMV keeps a list of people who have used green cards, for instance, to get their driver’s license. And if you’re an election official and you take your voter list and you put it against that data, you would say, oh, my God, we found thousands of noncitizens on our voting lists. In the DMV, it says these are people who are noncitizens.
And I talked to Charles Stewart about this, who is an election expert, MIT, who has tried to drill down on this issue, has looked at it in a number of states, and here’s how he explained it.
CHARLES STEWART: When you do the due diligence on those matches, what you discover is that in virtually all those cases, those are people who got their driver’s license when they were noncitizens, and they naturalized. And there’s no requirement that you tell the DMV that you naturalized. And so you continue on the DMV record as someone who looks like a noncitizen for years, maybe even decades after first getting your license.
PARKS: And so what these news releases often don’t say is that when you actually investigate these cases of potential noncitizen voting fraud, if not zero, usually it’s, like, a dozen or eight people, and even among those people who have actually been found to be noncitizens registered to vote or voting, many of those people are found to be accidental. And so if you just keep drilling down on this data, you just keep getting closer and closer to zero.
KHALID: All right. Well, on that note, let’s take a quick break, and we’ll be back in a moment.
And we’re back. And Jude, something I’m curious about is that, you know, we’ve acknowledged these claims of noncitizens voting is not new, but why and how does it seem to be reenergized in this political moment? Why now? Why are we hearing about all of this again?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Well, I think the unprecedented numbers of people coming to the U.S.-Mexico border has created an environment for this conspiracy theory to really take off. But, you know, it’s not new. And my colleague Odette Yousef has done some great reporting on the origins of this rhetoric, which really echoes a once-fringe racist conspiracy theory known as great replacement theory. And that’s the idea that elites are purposefully bringing in immigrants of color to dilute the votes of whites in the U.S. or in Western countries in order to advance a political agenda. And so that theory, which was once pretty fringe, has been becoming more and more mainstream, especially among Republicans in recent years.
So I think in 2022, there was actually survey data showing that 1 in 3 Americans now believed some version of this theory. And we’ve been seeing this rhetoric really escalate. We’ve been seeing Elon Musk amplify this kind of rhetoric this campaign season. And as extremists note, great replacement theory has been tied to a number of violent episodes – mass shootings over the years. So that combined with the tension we’re already planning to see in the post-election period, has some folks who study extremism really worried.
PARKS: Yeah. I also feel like, you know, over the last few years, the whole kind of election denial wing of the Republican Party has been searching for what the conspiracy du jour of 2024 is going to be. And I’ve been kind of watching this develop online for the last few years. And polling shows that Republicans generally think immigration is the number one issue facing this country this year. And so I think the convergence of those two issues is kind of obvious to me as well.
KHALID: Miles, just today, I got an email from the Republican Party and the Trump campaign saying that they are suing the Nevada secretary of state for, quote, “illegally allowing noncitizens to register to vote.” I want to get a sense from you of how election officials are responding to these efforts and these claims. I imagine this is not the only isolated lawsuit, the one that I mentioned in Nevada.
PARKS: No. We see lawsuits pop up, and I think we’ll continue to see them as the election gets closer and in the post-election period. This kind of fits under the – what election lawyer Justin Levitt once told me, you know, lawsuits are basically just press releases with a filing fee sometimes. I think it also connects to over the last few years, we’ve seen Republican states try to get ballot questions about this issue, trying to ban noncitizens from voting even though it’s already illegal in federal elections.
And I think all kind of – when I talk to election officials, this all kind of feels they can keep talking about a solution to a problem that, again, does not exist, then they can build this idea in people’s minds that there is a problem. And then I think the other thing I hear from election officials a lot is real worry about this idea of proof of citizenship being tied to registering to vote actually gaining momentum.
Because as we know, you know, my colleague Hansi Lo Wang covered a survey earlier this year that found that more than 20 million voters would not be able to get those – whether it’s a passport, birth certificate quickly to be able to register. And so there is a potential impact if these measures were to gain steam. And I talked about that with Adrian Fontes – who’s the secretary of state of Arizona – the other day.
ADRIAN FONTES: The question really here is, you know, you’re trying to thread a needle, and they’re using, you know, this gigantic weapon that’s going to encapsulate a whole bunch of people.
PARKS: I found that image really powerful – this idea of threading a needle – because when we talk about noncitizens voting, it’s, like, 10, 20, a few hundred on the rolls maybe in some of these states, but then, you know, adding this citizenship requirement could affect millions and millions of voters, and I find that disparity really interesting.
KHALID: I want to ask you both a closing question here, which is what happens next in this conversation? It seems like we’re going to potentially see additional lawsuits, but we know a number of states already have deadlines that are fast approaching for people to register to vote. So where does this conversation go from here?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Well, I think it’s really important to note that so much of this conversation really seems to be about laying the groundwork to discredit election results, even before any ballot is cast. And so this is sowing doubt in the election process and creating the groundwork to be able to point to noncitizens as a potential avenue for explaining why Trump could lose the election.
PARKS: And creating fear, right? Because if you are voter from a marginalized population and you were on the fence about voting – maybe you are a U.S. citizen, you’re eligible to vote, but your cousin who’s living with you is not or you know somebody who’s not – and creating this sense that voting is something that can put you in jail or can ruin your life in some way, even if you are an eligible voter, I think, you know, it remains to be seen how this campaign of fear around this issue is going to impact turnout for some of these populations.
KHALID: All right. Something we will certainly all be keeping an eye on. Let’s leave it there for today. Jude Joffe-Block, thanks so much for coming on the show.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Thank you.
KHALID: I’m Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.
PARKS: I’m Miles Parks. I cover voting.
KHALID: And thank you all, as always, for listening to THE NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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