Trump’s Claims About Illegal Immigrant Voting Sets Stage for Election Protests

As the November election approaches, former President Donald Trump and his allies are raising concerns about people who are not American citizens voting.

Although it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and such cases are extremely sporadic, the possibility of voting illegally has become constant abstinence for the former president and Republicans in Congress, likely foreshadowing a post-election strategy to challenge the results if Trump loses.

“A lot of these illegal immigrants are coming into the country and trying to get them to vote,” Trump said during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this month in Philadelphia.

Just as Trump spent months questioning fraud surrounding mail-in voting ahead of the 2020 election, Pennsylvania election officials are now warning that his messaging about foreign voting is laying the groundwork for baseless challenges to voting results here and across the country in November.

“This disinformation has one goal: to sow distrust in our election system,” said Beth Gilbert, former Luzerne County elections director.

These claims are fueled in part by problems Pennsylvania has had in the past with non-citizen voting due to mistakes by legal residents and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. However, those issues have long since been resolved, and even when they were an issue, they are unlikely to have affected any election.

Trump has made wild and baseless claims about illegal voting for years. He blamed election fraud for losing the popular vote in 2016 even as he won the Electoral College. His vote-by-mail scare in 2020 has continued to fuel conspiracy theories for years.

“Now he’s lying again, this time about foreign voting, to set the stage for a challenge to the 2024 election results if he loses,” U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) argued during a federal hearing on the matter.

While the Republican Party’s claims for mass foreign voting are being promoted widely nationally, the proposal is also being taken directly to local activists in the Philadelphia area.

Speaking to a crowd of election watchers in Montgomery County last week, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Watley highlighted the actions his home state of North Carolina took to secure the 2020 election.

“We said only American citizens can vote,” Watley said, citing a North Carolina law that requires voters to prove they are citizens when registering to vote.

It’s already the law in most states. Noncitizens can’t vote in federal elections. Like in North Carolina, voters in Pennsylvania must sign an affidavit attesting to their citizenship before registering to vote.

What are the laws in Pennsylvania?

The risk of noncitizens voting has become a key talking point for Republicans across the country and in Pennsylvania. The topic has come up at statehouse meetings in Montgomery County and fueled anti-immigration fervor in Delaware County.

“We hear this … misinformation at every election board meeting, and it has only gotten worse over the last year,” said Montgomery County Commissioner Neil Makhija, who chairs the county elections board.

The Republican Party’s message about non-resident voting is part of a broader focus on immigration by Trump and his allies in the final weeks of the election — going beyond the facts about illegal crossings of the southern border to include baseless claims that Democrats are trying to get these migrants to vote and that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

“These falsehoods, this disinformation, this anti-immigration vitriol that has been pervasive for a year now … is having a real impact on people,” said Jasmine Rivera, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition.

There is no evidence that illegal immigrants or legal immigrants who are not yet citizens vote in significant numbers in Pennsylvania or anywhere else in the country.

AND Brennan Center study on the 2016 election found that of the 23.5 million votes cast in 42 jurisdictions, just 30 were cast by people suspected of being foreign nationals — an infinitesimal proportion that is unlikely to affect the outcome of any election.

IN In Pennsylvania, a voter must be a citizen and resident of the state for at least 30 days to register to vote. When Pennsylvanians vote for the first time, they must bring a valid ID. Voters’ citizenship is verified using their Social Security number and license number. If their status is not verified, they cannot vote.

And the claims are not novel. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt noted that he has heard versions of today’s claims about noncitizen voting dating back to 2012. States including Kansas and Arizona have sought to pass strict proof-of-citizenship laws to address those claims, but those rules have jeopardized the status of thousands of legal voters in the process. The Kansas law was struck down by a federal court in 2018, while the Arizona lawsuit remains pending.

“It’s important to put this in context that we’ve heard this before, it’s coming up again, and it can be an easy way to inject suspicion into the process, when in fact, states have a lot of systems in place to discourage noncitizens from voting,” said Amy Widestrom, executive director of the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters.

Pennsylvania’s Non-Citizen Voting History

Real-world examples of foreign voting in Pennsylvania over the past few years have contributed to Republican Party claims that foreigners will vote in droves in November.

For several years until 2017, Pennsylvania struggled with a software glitch that prevented a tiny number of non-citizen Pennsylvania drivers from casting ballots. Schmidt, then a Republican member of the Philadelphia City Commissioners’ Office, discovered the glitch and worked with the Department of Transportation to fix it.

The glitch turned out to be caused by computers at PennDot that asked all Pennsylvania drivers who received a driver’s license if they wanted to register to vote, regardless of their citizenship status.

As a result, 317 Philadelphia voters contacted Schmidt’s office to cancel their registrations because they were not eligible to vote. At the time, Schmidt’s office said only 44 votes had been cast. Statewide, officials predicted that the number of out-of-state voters would be in the thousands.

“These errors are being weaponized to suggest that there is widespread fraud in our elections and that the entire system cannot be trusted, which is simply not true,” said Jasleen Singh, a staff attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice.

A long-resolved Pennsylvania bug is being used as evidence that out-of-state voting is a potential problem nationwide. During a federal hearing on the matter, Cleta Mitchell, an Oklahoma lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 results, falsely claimed that 100,000 voters were illegally registered through a Pennsylvania bug, a claim the State Department rejects as faulty.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group led by Mitchell, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking access to the Pennsylvania records.

However, PennDot addressed the issue after Schmidt brought it to his attention in 2017 by ensuring that only citizens would be able to register to vote when obtaining a driver’s license.

“There was no litigation involved. There was no evidence that any U.S. citizen was disenfranchised as a result of this process,” Schmidt said in an interview this month.

And the situation in Pennsylvania underscored the enormous risks of registering to vote illegally. Schmidt traveled the country testifying on behalf of legal immigrants who faced deportation because they mistakenly registered to vote.

He criticized attempts to introduce laws to prove citizenship as irresponsible measures that would disenfranchise legal voters in exchange for allowing non-citizens to vote.

“We should focus on solving problems for which there is documented evidence,” he said.