The threat of voter fraud is one of the more durable myths in American politics, probably because it has proved so useful. Lately, it has taken a radical turn: Donald Trump and his allies have combined their two principal obsessions—immigration and election “integrity”—to conjure the spectre of immigrants crossing the border to elect Kamala Harris President. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in,” Trump said, at the September 10th Presidential debate, “they don’t even know what country they’re in.” Gesturing toward Harris, he added, “These people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”
The fiction that undocumented immigrants are illegally voting is now the explicit position of the Party establishment. Earlier this year, the House Republicans passed a bill forbidding non-citizens to vote in federal elections, even though it’s already against the law and actual cases are exceptionally rare and statistically negligible. A Brennan Center for Justice study of twenty-three million votes cast in 2016 found just thirty cases in which state election officials suspected that non-citizens had tried to vote. A 2022 audit in Georgia determined that, in twenty-five years, roughly two thousand people lacking citizenship documents tried to register to vote, but that none cast a ballot, because of the state’s screening procedures.
Facts won’t deter Republicans on this point, however, for the same reason that Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, keep repeating their scurrilous lies about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of Ohio: white anxiety about a diversifying country has become one of the Party’s greatest assets. This spring, when the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, said that “illegals” were voting and Democrats were abetting them, he was forced to admit that he had no real evidence. But, he said, “we all know, intuitively.”
The House bill foundered in the Senate, but Johnson has since tried to force Democrats to vote for it as part of a spending package to keep the government from shutting down this fall. His latest attempt failed last week. Yet the bill has already fulfilled its purpose: Party-line support has spurred parallel measures in states across the country. Republicans have hastily tried to purge voter rolls and add deliberately burdensome identification requirements to register. Last year, at the behest of Virginia’s Republican governor, the state removed more than three thousand people from the rolls who were, in fact, legally qualified to vote. (The state later admitted the error.) This summer, in Ohio, the secretary of state removed five hundred people, some of whom turned out to be naturalized citizens. According to the Times, on a recent call with Republican activists and officials in several states, one person proposed combing through voter lists “to look for ethnic names.”
Other Republican officials have taken advantage of the situation to harass anyone who might be aligned with Democrats. Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, created an Election Integrity Unit that uses “undercover operations” to root out voter fraud. In the early morning of August 20th, an eighty-seven-year-old woman named Lidia Martínez opened the door of her home in San Antonio to find nine armed officers in tactical gear who’d arrived to execute a search warrant. For decades, Martínez, working with the oldest Latino civil-rights organization in the country, known as LULAC, had helped veterans and senior citizens register to vote in South Texas. She was now accused of “harvesting” illegal votes. Agents questioned her for several hours and seized her phone, computer, and personal calendar. The homes of other Latino Democrats were also searched, in what Paxton’s office called an “ongoing election integrity investigation.”
What makes these maneuvers most worrisome is that they seem aimed to cast doubt on the election results in November. Not only do the majority of Republican voters say that they still believe the 2020 election was stolen; much of the Party leadership professes to as well. Michael Whatley, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, whom Trump handpicked to serve alongside Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, is an ardent election denier. The head of the R.N.C.’s “election litigation” team currently faces criminal charges for her alleged role in the fake-electors scheme to overturn the 2020 results in Arizona. (She denies any wrongdoing.) At the direction of the Trump campaign, the R.N.C. has all but abandoned any get-out-the-vote efforts and has instead shifted its money and resources into mobilizing a hundred thousand volunteers to stand watch anywhere votes are cast or counted.
In 2020, Trump supporters were effectively improvising when they challenged the election returns. Since then, many have developed strategies to insure that their next effort is more systematic. A national coalition of G.O.P. activists and state and federal Party officials, called Only Citizens Vote, recently began to organize rallies and to give training sessions for poll monitors. They have the support of an ever-larger number of public officeholders: as of last year, in a third of the country, an election denier is responsible for administering the 2024 elections at the state level.
At the center of the operation is Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative activist and lawyer who advised Trump on how to block the certification of the 2020 election results. After Trump left office, Mitchell started the Election Integrity Network. For the past three years, it has recruited volunteers to hunt for voter fraud and to research the personal backgrounds of state and local election officials to determine whether, according to a training manual, they are “friend or foe.”
Earlier this month, a chapter of the network led by a county election official in Georgia held a Zoom call to make preparations for November. The state’s election board, which is controlled by Trumpists, had recently changed the rules to allow any county officials to halt certification on the basis of undefined concerns about voting irregularities; last week, the Georgia attorney general’s office rebuked the board after it voted to require a manual count of every ballot cast on Election Day. On the call, participants discussed how poll monitors could try to challenge voters if they, say, spoke shaky English or came with a utility bill as proof of their address. “People are going to have to be pains in the ass,” a former Trump Administration official named John Zadrozny said, according to a leaked recording of the call. “You’ve got to be creative without breaking the law.”
All these actions may help lay the groundwork to potentially dispute the certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6th. The big lie of a stolen election is predicated on the smaller one that non-citizens are voting. Neither can be ignored. ♦
