How Republicans mainstreamed the baseless idea of noncitizen voting in 2024

If things aren’t going Donald Trump’s way on election night, he has given a good idea of how he may contest the results.

Trump and his allies have zeroed in on the baseless claim that Democrats are encouraging newly arrived migrants to vote for them in the 2024 election.

“Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” Trump said at the Sept. 10 presidential debate.

There’s no evidence of a plot like this. Moreover, it’s illegal for non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections, and evidence shows instances of such voting are incredibly rare.

But it became clear this summer that the claim that noncitizens are poised to vote in big numbers had become one of the top false narratives leading up to the election.

The topic is unavoidable on conservative media, as are misleading posts about it on X, where owner Elon Musk has become a leading booster of the narrative.

Related: Oregon closed its elections phone lines after a flood of conspiracy calls

Election officials across the country say the topic is now the most prevalent concern they are hearing from the public as voting has started in close to 20 states.

“It’s been a really common thing,” said Meagan Wolfe, the administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “I should say, people aren’t providing any sort of evidence about this. But a concern that they’re bringing to our attention is that they believe that there are noncitizens that are voting.”

How a narrative goes mainstream

The spread of noncitizen voting claims shows how a baseless idea can get mainstreamed if enough prominent voices center in on it.

It’s not a new talking point for Trump, who falsely blamed noncitizen votes for his loss of the popular vote in 2016, as well as his narrow loss of Arizona in 2020.

But what’s different this time around is that more Republicans at different levels of government are echoing the claim that noncitizens pose a major threat to election integrity.

Congressional Republicans have used the claim to push for changing federal law to mandate documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. (Right now, would-be voters need to attest upon penalty of perjury that they are citizens.)

Several Republican-led states are voting on ballot measures this fall to add explicit bans on noncitizen voting.

The Republican National Committee and Trump-aligned groups have filed last-minute lawsuits in a number of states over alleged noncitizens on the voter rolls. State officials have countered there are already safeguards in place to prevent ineligible voters, while other opponents say the lawsuits — filed too close to the election for any changes to be legally made to the voter rolls — appear to be about messaging and sowing doubts.

The topic has also become a focus for certain GOP state officials, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who announced a criminal probe into voter registration efforts after a debunked rumor spread about noncitizens registering to vote.

“The other Republican leaders who may have argued against or at least avoided this type of political rhetoric linking immigration and voter fraud — they’re gone, they’ve been purged from the party,” said David Kimball, a political scientist at University of Missouri, St. Louis, who studies perceptions of voter fraud.

“So now it’s not just [Trump],” Kimball said. “It’s other leaders up and down the party who are reinforcing these claims.”

The issue seems to provide some cover for state-level Republican election officials who want to be seen as strong on election integrity at a time when GOP voters are extremely skeptical about voting procedures, without necessarily going along with Trump’s entire bevy of conspiracy theorizing.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, famously debunked many of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election in his state. But his office has also made noncitizen voting a priority this year, despite being clear he doesn’t think it is currently a problem in American elections.

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia who said Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020, also directed his office to take controversial steps to protect against noncitizen voting, despite evidence the procedures could harm eligible voters.

The Department of Justice and civil rights groups sued Virginia over the efforts, alleging the program violated federal law by systematically purging voters within 90 days of an election. Youngkin and Trump have criticized the federal lawsuit as being politically motivated.

Related: Administrator explains how Oregon DMV accidentally registered people to vote

Earlier this week, a federal judge ruled a similar effort in Alabama “blew the [90-day] deadline” and had ensnared thousands of U.S. citizens. Of the 3,251 voters Alabama inactivated due to suspicions they were noncitizens, the state has so far acknowledged that 2,074 are in fact eligible voters, according to court filings.

Public perception of the noncitizen voting claims

Exaggerated claims about noncitizens committing voter fraud actually go back to the 1800s. And experts say they usually spike during periods of nonwhite immigration due to fears about how the influx of people will change the country.

An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released earlier this month found 52% of voters were concerned about noncitizens voting in the presidential election. Broken out by party affiliation, 81% of Republicans were concerned, compared with 53% of independents and 25% of Democrats.

One of those Republicans is Greg Gutzki, of Colorado, who told NPR in a follow-up interview that noncitizen voting is a bigger concern to him this year compared to previous elections, because of the spike in border crossings that happened earlier in the Biden administration.

“This is part of the agenda, to flood the nation with people that will ultimately vote Democratic, and not be citizens, and vote in our elections — just because the people who let them in there, it’s kind of like a payback,” Gutzki said.

There isn’t evidence of an effort to get border-crossers to vote, though it is a perception other poll respondents shared.

Carol Poucher, a Republican from Tennessee, told NPR she is concerned about noncitizens voting “either by purpose or by accident because they think they’re allowed to.”

Poucher added that she worries about data breaches. “I don’t think we’ve got our system organized. I don’t think we have our system secure,” she said.

Mistakes do happen. Oregon’s department of motor vehicles recently discovered errors in its automatic voter registration system that caused 1,561 people to be mistakenly added to state voter rolls who had not provided proof of U.S. citizenship. As of Oct. 7, state authorities had identified 10 people from that list who had voted, and confirmed that at least five had been citizens when they cast ballots.

Related: Kotek calls for pause to Motor Voter program due to errant voter registrations

Another Republican poll respondent, Barry Grigg, who lives in California, told NPR he is unconvinced his state’s protocols are rigorous enough to prevent noncitizens from voting. Since undocumented immigrants in the state can get driver’s licenses, Grigg worries those licenses could help noncitizens register.

But Jordan Reilly, a spokesperson for the California secretary of state’s office, told NPR that if someone using a voter registration form lists the number from one of those licenses, known as an AB 60 license, “Our system would prevent that registration from being processed.”

Noncitizens who attempt to vote illegally face prison, deportation and can lose the chance to become a citizen.

A number of voting officials told NPR that when they talk to voters about the issue, they mention the security measures in place to prevent it, but also point out how little sense the premise makes — that a person evading government detection would show up to a government office or polling location to cast a single vote.

Lisa Tollefson, the clerk in Wisconsin’s Rock County and a Democrat, said she remembers fielding questions about the issue at county poll worker training over the summer.

“Do you really think someone who’s a noncitizen — that’s not supposed to be here — wants to be highlighted at the polls? Do you think they’re going to show up?” she remembered asking people, while also pointing to Wisconsin’s ID requirements.

As to whether her explanations make a difference, she said “it depends how far they have gone down the rabbit hole.”

“There’s all these checks and balances we have in the system,” Tollefson said. “It’s kind of using your logic to get them to the point where they can think about it more clearly.”

How the rhetoric could affect this election

If Trump were to lose the election, the lawsuits that his campaign and allies have filed against states over possible noncitizens on the voter rolls could be fodder for allegations of fraud — and may be used to expedite legal challenges to the results.

Election officials and civil rights groups are also warning the noncitizen voting narrative could lead to harassment of naturalized citizens and people of color at the polls.

“People who may have an accent or may have a different color skin, these are voters just like everybody else,” said Joseph Kirk, who runs elections in Georgia’s Bartow County. “I’m concerned with all this fervor and talk about this, that legitimate voters who just want their voices heard will be pushed away from the process, afraid to come in, will have a very unpleasant experience just because of rhetoric.”