If Trump loses in November, GOP may blame inflated concerns about noncitizen voting — like Pa. mail ballots in 2020

As the November election approaches, former President Donald Trump and his allies are amplifying concerns that people who aren’t American citizens are voting.

Though it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and instances of it occurring are extremely rare, the potential for illegally cast ballots has become a constant refrain for the former president and congressional Republicans in what likely previews a postelection strategy to dispute results if Trump loses.

“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” Trump said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this month in Philadelphia.

Just as Trump spent months making false claims of fraud in mail voting ahead of the 2020 election, elections officials in Pennsylvania warn his messaging on noncitizen voting is setting the stage for baseless challenges to the results here and across the country in November.

“This misinformation serves one purpose, and that’s to sow distrust in our election system,” said Beth Gilbert, the former director of elections in Luzerne County.

The claims are driven in part by issues Pennsylvania has had in the past with noncitizen voting due to mistakes made by legal residents and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. But those issues are long resolved, and even when it was a problem, it is unlikely to have swayed any elections.

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

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

While the GOP claims of rampant noncitizen voting are being pushed on a broad national scale, the pitch is also being made directly to local activists in the Philadelphia area.

Speaking to a crowd of poll-watching volunteers in Montgomery County last week, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Watley highlighted things his home state of North Carolina did to safeguard elections in 2020.

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

This is already the law in most states. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. As in North Carolina, Pennsylvania voters must sign an affidavit affirming their citizenship before registering to vote.

The risk of noncitizens voting has become a key talking point for Republicans across the country and in Pennsylvania. The topic has popped up at government meetings in Montgomery County, and it has added fuel to an anti-immigrant fervor in Delaware County.

“We hear this … disinformation at every single election board meeting, and it has only increased in the past year,” said Montgomery County Commissioner Neil Makhija, who chairs the county’s election board.

GOP messaging on noncitizen voting is part of a broader push on immigration by Trump and his allies in the final weeks of the election — one that extends beyond the facts of illegal crossings at the southern border to unfounded claims that Democrats are working to get those migrants to vote and that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

“These mistruths, this disinformation, this anti-immigrant vitriol that has been pervasive for a year now … has had real-world impacts on people,” said Jasmine Rivera, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition.

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

A Brennan Center study of the 2016 election found that, of 23.5 million votes in 42 jurisdictions, only 30 votes were cast by suspected noncitizens — an infinitesimally small fraction highly unlikely to affect the result of any election.

In Pennsylvania, a voter must have been a citizen and state resident for at least 30 days in order to register to vote. The first time Pennsylvanians vote, 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 are not able to vote.

And the claims aren’t new. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt noted that he’s heard versions of today’s noncitizen voting claims since 2012. States including Kansas and Arizona have sought to enact strict proof-of-citizenship laws to address the claims, but those policies have threatened the status of thousands of legal voters in the process. Kansas’ law was struck down in federal court in 2018, while litigation on Arizona’s remains pending.

“It’s important to put it in context that this is something we’ve heard before, it’s coming up again, and it can be sort of an easy way to introduce suspicion into the process, when in fact states have multiple systems in place to deter noncitizen voting,” said Amy Widestrom, executive director of the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters.

Real instances of noncitizens voting in Pennsylvania over several years have helped fuel GOP claims that noncitizens will vote en masse in November.

For several years up until 2017, Pennsylvania confronted a programming glitch that resulted in a small number of Pennsylvania drivers who weren’t citizens casting ballots. Schmidt, then a Republican member of the Philadelphia Office of the City Commissioners, discovered the glitch and worked with the Department of Transportation to resolve it.

The glitch was traced to computers at PennDot, which asked all Pennsylvania drivers who got their licenses whether they wanted to register to vote, regardless of citizenship status.

As a result, 317 Philadelphia voters contacted Schmidt’s office to have their registrations canceled because they were ineligible to vote. Just 44 cast ballots, Schmidt’s office said at the time. Statewide, officials predicted the number of noncitizen voters was in the thousands.

“These mistakes are being weaponized to imply that there’s widespread fraud in our elections and you can’t trust the entire system, which is simply not true,” said Jasleen Singh, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice.

The long-ago resolved Pennsylvania glitch is being used as proof of noncitizen voting as a potential issue nationwide. In a federal hearing on the topic, Cleta Mitchell, an Oklahoma attorney who assisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results, falsely claimed 100,000 voters had been illegally registered via the glitch in Pennsylvania, a figure the Department of State rejects as inaccurate.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group chaired by Mitchell, is suing in federal court for access to Pennsylvania’s records.

But PennDot resolved the issue after Schmidt raised it in 2017, ensuring only citizens were offered the opportunity to register to vote when obtaining driver’s licenses.

“There was no litigation related to it. There was no evidence that a single citizen of the United States was disenfranchised as a result of this process,” Schmidt said in an interview this month.

And the situation in Pennsylvania underscored the immense risk that comes with illegally registering to vote. Schmidt traveled the country testifying on behalf of legal immigrants who were facing deportation because they had mistakenly registered to vote.

He criticized efforts to institute further proof of citizenship laws as irresponsible measures that would disenfranchise legal voters in an effort to find noncitizens voting.

“We should focus our attention on addressing issues that are documented to actually exist,” he said.