No, illegals don’t vote, except in tiny numbers.
Few things about U.S. elections are more true than this statement: Non-citizens can’t and don’t vote in federal and state elections. Voting by illegals is extremely rare and never affects election results. We’re talking about so few individuals they’re irrelevant in this debate.
Republicans passed a bill on July 9, 2024 that would require proof of citizenship for voter registration. Introduced by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), one of the GOP’s most inflammatory and least credible congressmen, H.R. 8281 is called the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.” It’s election-year theater and will go nowhere in the Senate.
Its sole purpose is to give Republicans a campaign talking point. As Mother Jones explains (here), it “fuses two of the central planks of the MAGA agenda—anti-immigrant hysteria and voter fraud paranoia.”
Currently, voter registration is conducted on an honor system, backed by legal penalties for lying: Registrants only need to attest, under penalty of perjury, they are U.S. citizens. The SAVE Act would require them to prove citizenship with documentation, such as a birth certificate or passport.
What’s the problem with that? First, research has found that about 9% of eligible voters — roughly 21 million U.S. citizens — don’t have easy access to such documentation. People especially disadvantaged by such a requirement are those who move frequently, e.g. students and homeless people.
Second, it’s a solution to a non-problem. In 2016, a Brennan Center survey found 30 cases of suspected voting by noncitizens in 42 jurisdictions with 23 million people. In Georgia, a state audit determined 1,600 noncitizens “attempted to register to vote over a 25-year period and none were successful.” (See article here.)
All the Republican bill would do is disenfranchise American citizens, and that’s exactly what it’s designed and intended to do. It won’t stop illegal voting, because there’s no illegal voting to stop, beyond a negligible number that has no influence on election results.
Disenfranchising marginalized voters, who tend to lean Democratic, is of course the real objective of the GOP bill. The honor system works, in that illegals don’t vote, but doesn’t keep students and poor people from voting, which is why Republicans want to change it.
GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”
This is doubletalk. Translated into plain English it means “We Republicans all feel in our gut [‘know intuitively’] that illegals are voting, and the lack of proof doesn’t persuade us, because facts don’t matter to us.”
Facts are at the heart of this, so this is a good time to briefly review different kinds of facts.
“Facts” fall into three basic categories: Real facts, legal facts, and political facts. “Real facts” are reality. “Legal facts” are what a court uses to decide cases, are a crapshoot, and at best come out as distortions of the real facts, which is why lawyers prefer to settle cases. Political facts are assertions made in a political context to advance a partisan agenda, and any resemblances to real facts are accidental and random.
Illegal voting is a political fact, not reality. It’s not a legal fact, either, because all of the Republicans’ illegal voting challenges were rejected by the dozens of courts in which they were filed, in all cases for lack of evidence. But as a “political fact,” it serves well enough the GOP agenda of making it more difficult to vote, in order to suppress Democratic voter turnout.
Anyone who’s ever taken flying lessons will remember the instructor saying if you can’t see the ground, trust the instruments, not the seat of your pants. Instruments are hard data, and don’t lie, i.e. reality; whereas your gut feelings are subjective and unreliable. Trying to fly by the seat of your pants when you find yourself in clouds or fog is a good way to crash an airplane.
Writing voting rules based on Republicans’ “intuitive knowledge” is no way to run elections, either. We should not accept their subjective feelings; we should demand proof of their claims that ineligibles are voting in large numbers. This is especially true because study after study has shown those claims are false.
What about “confidence” in elections? That’s just another Republican tactic to further their attack on our democracy.
Republicans tell their supporters to distrust our elections. Then they argue their supporters’ lack of confidence in our elections is a valid reason to reject election results. It’s not. If they want to distrust elections, that’s their prerogative; but it’s also their problem, not our problem.
Republicans, along with the rest of us, are entitled to elections run in compliance with election laws and procedures to the best of election workers’ ability. They’re not entitled to perfect err0r-free elections. Nor are they entitled to elections in which they have confidence.
The rest of us are entitled to legitimate election results being the last word. If they won’t accept the results because they subjectively lack of confidence in them, an appropriate response on our part is, “We don’t care, take a hike.”