WASHINGTON — Threats of unauthorized immigrants voting in presidential elections have become an issue in the 2024 campaign, and some experts say it could spark new challenges to election results in Pennsylvania and other battleground states.
Former President Donald Trump and various GOP officials have raised the specter of voter fraud as they refuse to say that they will accept the results of this year’s election. Similar allegations disrupted Pennsylvania’s vote count four years ago.
“We are certainly seeing attempts in 2024 to set the stage for that type of attempt to subvert the outcome of elections, putting hooks in the wall now so they have some place to hang their hats on later,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of voting rights at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.
This fall, the U.S. House sought to pass a law blocking noncitizens from voting. Opponents argued the measure also could have prevented legal voters from casting ballots, but candidate Trump has been leaning into accusations that his rivals are bringing immigrants into the country illegally so they can vote Nov. 5.
“They can't even speak English. They don't even know what country they're in practically,” Trump said during his September debate in Philadelphia with Vice President Kamala Harris. “And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that's why they're allowing them to come into our country.”
Experts who track elections say instances of noncitizen voting are both illegal and rare, but not unheard of.
A 1996 federal law allows fines and imprisoned for up to a year for noncitizens who vote in federal elections. Violators also can be deported. When people in the U.S. register to vote, they swear under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens.
In Pennsylvania, only people who meet various requirements, including citizenship, can register to vote. Under the state constitution, a voter must “have been a citizen of the United States at least one month,” in addition to meeting state and voting district residency requirements.
Nationally, the Brennan Center found 30 possible votes by noncitizens out of 23.5 million votes overseen by election officials in the 2016 elections.
Election officials in California, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee found 324 potential cases of noncitizens voting cases out of more than 29 million votes cast in 2016, according to the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a Washington group that works with elections officials.
After winning the 2016 election over Hillary Clinton with 304 electoral votes, Trump questioned the outcome, saying he would have won the popular vote as well had it not been for millions of illegal voters. Once in office, the new president appointed a commission to investigate. It found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
The Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council — comprised of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors — said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”
Protecting elections
Proponents of tighter security measures such as the recent failed U.S. House bill say they are not looking to overturn elections but to prevent ineligible voters from changing the outcome.
“Vigilance is the operative word in making sure it doesn’t happen,” Harrisburg Republican consultant Charlie Gerow said. “You want to make sure elections themselves are not impacted by illegal activity.”
The House Republican legislation would have required states to ensure that only citizens were registered to vote and cast ballots by providing certain types of documentation when they registered.
“Only American citizens should be allowed to vote in American elections, plain and simple,” U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Butler, said as the chamber considered the measure. “This is a cornerstone of our democracy. Proud to support it!”
“Americans deserve safe and secure elections,” agreed U.S. Rep Guy Reschenthaler, R-Peters, on the social media site X.
After the House passed the bill in July largely along party lines, it was deemed dead on arrival in the Senate. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., then sought to add it to legislation funding the federal government past Sept. 30. Mr. Kelly, Mr. Reschenthaler and U.S. Rep. Glenn Thompson, voted yes both times.
“Lax voter registration laws could make it possible for noncitizens to register and vote in federal elections,” said Mr. Thompson, R-Centre. “Simply requiring all individuals to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote in federal elections is common sense.”
The full House rejected a spending bill with the noncitizen provision attached, and Congress eventually voted to keep the government open until Dec. 20 without new voting restrictions.
Bipartisan concern
While Republicans have been out front pushing the issue, polls show the topic has the support of many Democrats as well.
As many as a third of Democrats said they were worried about voter fraud, with a quarter of them specifically concerned about noncitizen voting, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll.
The issue has trickled down to the state and local level.
State Rep. Ryan Warner, R-Fayette, this month introduced legislation requiring proof of U.S. citizenship before someone can register to vote. He said bans on noncitizen voting under federal law and in the state constitution were not sufficient to stop someone from registering.
“We have a responsibility to our citizens to ensure every vote cast is a legitimate, legal vote,” Mr. Warner said. “If even one person votes illegally, it cancels out a legal voter’s choice to lead our communities, state and nation.”
Allegheny County Councilman Sam DeMarco, who also is chairman of the county Republican Party, has introduced legislation to require county election officials to cross-reference local voter rolls with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to ensure everyone listed is a citizen. But Homeland Security doesn’t maintain such lists.
Mr. DeMarco said there was “a gap in our system” and he was “just trying to close it.”
He cited news reports of ineligible people voting in local elections. In one instance, the Post-Gazette reported in September 2017 that three legal immigrants who were ineligible to vote nevertheless cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election. More than 650,000 people in Allegheny County voted in that election.
Several years ago, some noncitizens at Pennsylvania Department of Transportation centers were given the ability to register to vote. Department of State spokesman Geoff Morrow said the problem was fixed in 2017.
State officials found 544 votes cast by noncitizens from 2000 through 2017, according to NPR. A total of 93 million votes were cast during that period.
PennDOT now requires citizenship status when residents seek a new or updated driver’s license or identification card, and those registering to vote must affirm under penalty of perjury that they meet the requirements, Mr. Morrow said.
“Noncitizens do not get registered to vote, nor do they encounter any opportunity to register to vote when getting a driver's license in Pennsylvania,” he said. “Furthermore, it is a crime for a noncitizen to register to vote in Pennsylvania, and doing so could result in jail time and deportation.”
The debate is taking place against efforts by some states to impose new restrictions on voting following a U.S. Supreme Court decision that eliminated a key part of the landmark Voting Rights Act. That 1965 law was enacted in response to Jim Crow laws that blocked Blacks from voting.
“We, of course, are not opposed to verifying the eligibility and making sure we have in place the security measures to keep our elections safe and secure,” said Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United/Let America Vote, a Washington-based advocacy group that supports making it easier to cast ballots. “What we are opposed to is voter suppression. We are opposed to measures that target some voters from accessing the ballot box.”
Republican Jewish Coalition spokesman Sam Markstein rejected suggestions that the goal is to undermine legal voting.
“What's more important than maintaining public faith in our elections?” he said. “When you see politicians voting against a bill that would secure our elections, I think that rubs a lot of voters the wrong way.”
Documentation
The House-passed legislation would have required people registering to vote provide documents proving they're citizens, such as passports, birth certificates with their current name, naturalization papers or other government identification showing their place of birth.
A separate Brennan Center study found that 21.3 million people couldn’t quickly get their hands on the documents, including 3.8 million whose papers were lost, stolen or destroyed.
Mr. Gerow, himself a naturalized citizen, rejected those assertions. “If folks don’t have the identification, it’s easy to get,” he said.
Similar objections have been raised to another popular proposal — requiring voters to show their IDs at polling places.
A Pew Research Center survey earlier this year found broad bipartisan support for requiring all voters to show some kind of government-issued photo identification at the polling place in order to vote, including 95% of Republicans and 69% of Democrats.
Like noncitizen voting, in-person voter fraud — the only kind that voter ID can address — is rare, according to researchers. Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, found 31 possible cases out of more than 1 billion votes from 2000 through 2014.
The League of Women Voters argues that voter ID laws make it harder for certain eligible groups of voters to cast their ballots.
A North Carolina voter ID law was thrown out by a federal appeals court for targeting Black voters “with almost surgical precision” after lawmakers obtained information on voting patterns by race. The court said the law “retained only those types of photo ID disproportionately held by whites and excluded those disproportionately held by African Americans.”
Republican strategist Vince Galko noted that Gov. Josh Shapiro recently attempted to buy a canned alcoholic cocktail to mark a new state law allowing convenience and grocery stores to sell it. Mr. Shapiro forgot his driver’s license and had to walk away empty-handed.
“The sad thing is, he couldn’t buy four cans of a watered-down drink, but he could vote for president of the United States without an ID,” Mr. Galko said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
First Published: October 17, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: October 18, 2024, 4:05 p.m.
