The bad faith non-citizen voting bills being proposed by Republicans in state legislatures around the country serve to bolster the voter fraud myth Trump is poised to push if he loses in the fall — but the bills themselves may also disenfranchise actual eligible voters if passed.
Ahead of the 2024 election, Republican state lawmakers are mirroring an ongoing national campaign that’s been pushed by Donald Trump and his allies in recent weeks: proposing laws that perpetuate the false narrative that non-citizens have been and will continue to vote in federal elections.
These bills, however, not only threaten to create a general sense of distrust in the election system, — they also threaten to potentially disenfranchise voters ahead of November by creating additional bureaucratic hurdles for eligible voters or by requiring election officials to rely on outdated voter data to determine citizenship.
These state level efforts come against the backdrop of a larger national effort spearheaded by Trump, the RNC, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other Republican representatives and election deniers to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, a redundant bill making it illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.
The push is mostly a messaging effort: It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote and it’s something that rarely happens in U.S. elections.
“It’s all kind of driven by the same political motivation to reduce trust in elections, to cast doubt on the integrity of the process and to demonize immigrants as the kind of source of the flaws perceived or real or not in our electoral system,” director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, Jonathan Diaz, said
