Matt Rourke/AP Photo
With the National Voter Registration Act, Congress required states to offer people the opportunity to register to vote during the driver’s license application or renewal processes.
Earlier this month, the House Committee on Administration greeted the 31st anniversary of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) with a hearing that purported to examine the scourge of noncitizen voting. In the Republican House, the anniversary was nothing to celebrate. What unfolded was in fact an indictment of the NVRA, one of the country’s more successful efforts to expand the franchise for millions of Americans, by GOP committee members and four out of five members of a panel of witnesses.
The hearing, entitled “American Confidence in Elections: Preventing Noncitizen Voting and Other Foreign Interference,” descended into another Republican disinformation campaign. The attempt to transform the NVRA into the latest election administration wedge issue melds two GOP obsessions: voter fraud, now disguised as noncitizen voting, and the continual search for new ways to deny the franchise to traditional Democratic constituencies.
Popularly known as the “motor voter” law, the NVRA spurred an uptick in registrations (if not turnout) almost immediately. Since motor vehicles offices are government agencies that most Americans interact with regardless of ZIP code, Congress required states to offer people the opportunity to register to vote during the driver’s license application or renewal processes. The Election Assistance Commission recently noted that registering at these offices is the most popular way to sign up to vote.
Republicans have had their knives out for the NVRA since President Bill Clinton signed it into law in 1993. The measure responded to concerns about declines in voter turnout due to labyrinthine bureaucratic processes that in their worst incarnations suppressed voting by African Americans, Native Americans, and young people. (President George H.W. Bush had vetoed the measure just two years earlier.) Three years later, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which made it illegal for aliens to vote in federal elections.
The indignation over noncitizen voting often zeroes in on undocumented people, specifically the seven to eight million people who some GOP House members, as well as former Republican presidential candidates like Nikki Haley, claim have entered the country during the Biden administration.
Not only are these numbers grossly exaggerated; the claim that large numbers of migrants are somehow gaming state voter registration systems—amid their worries about housing and jobs for starters and despite stiff penalties that include deportation—is another baseless assertion that Republicans are pushing with lots of bluster but no actual data or other evidence. And they freely admit this. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said that Republicans “intuitively” know that “a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections but it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number”—as if statements by members of Congress give automatic credence to their claims.
A key talking point in this disinformation barrage is the claim that “every vote by a noncitizen cancels the vote of a citizen.”
People who have done the research have repeatedly documented that the numbers of noncitizens voting are minuscule. A 2017 Brennan Center analysis found that “across 42 jurisdictions, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 general election referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.”
Undeterred, Republican states are doing their part to track down these alleged malefactors. Last week, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose ordered local election officials to ferret out people whose citizenship status needs to be investigated. A review of Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles data found 137 people who, if they cannot provide proof of citizenship, will be removed from the voter rolls. LaRose conceded that these “well-meaning people” may have inadvertently registered.
In South Carolina, however, state officials including Republican Gov. Henry McMaster battled back against Rep. Adam Morgan, a Republican state representative and candidate for Congress who alleged that a state Medicaid office had registered a noncitizen to vote. The South Carolina Daily Gazette reported that the allegations were false and that state investigators noted, “Further, the first question on the South Carolina Voter Registration form asks, ‘Are you a citizen of the United States of America?’ If you check ‘No,’ the form clearly states in bold, ‘DO NOT complete this form.’”
Nevertheless, fears about noncitizen voting have prompted South Carolina along with Iowa Missouri, Kentucky, and Wisconsin to pursue ballot initiatives this year that specify citizenship requirements. Six other states have already passed such measures.
Another key talking point in this disinformation barrage is the claim that “every vote by a noncitizen cancels the vote of a citizen.” We can expect to hear that claim regularly in the coming weeks, as it is expressly designed to combine outrage with fresh-sown doubts about the strength and security of the American election system. So, the GOP reasoning goes, if 19 states and the District of Columbia allow undocumented people and legal aliens to drive, “millions” must of course be voting, because of motor voter laws. Never mind that voter registrations go through election administrative processes for verification.
Still, Speaker Johnson claims that “if a nefarious actor wants to intervene in our elections, all they have to do is check a box on a form and sign their name. That’s it. That’s all that’s required.” (“Check a box” is another erroneous description used to mischaracterize the motor voter registration process.)
What does the GOP have in mind to deal with their imaginary problem? The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) Act, introduced earlier this month, would amend the NRVA to require people to present government identification that indicates citizenship, such as a passport, a birth certificate, or naturalization papers, in order to register to vote.
At its core, the SAVE legislation would introduce new voting barriers. Only about half of Americans have passports. About 15 to 18 million Americans do not have a birth certificate. Many of the people who lack these documents are seniors or people of color.
The attempt to encumber the NVRA with citizenship requirements follows on the heels of the Republicans’ gutting of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which serves as a monitoring device to keep state voting rolls clean. Undermining ERIC has been a major goal of the GOP’s democracy disrupters. Nine Republican states—including Florida, Ohio, and Texas—withdrew from the national coalition in recent years, which weakened the ability of the remaining 24 states and the District of Columbia to clean up voter rolls and perform related election administration tasks.
Although the federal legislation likely won’t make much progress, House Republicans and more than 50 Democrats voted last week to strike down a District of Columbia law that allows noncitizens to vote in local elections. Two municipalities in California, three in Vermont, and 11 in Maryland allow noncitizens to vote, but Congress has the last word over laws in the nation’s capital and is determined to use the District as a proving ground for its anti-democratic impulses. That Republicans’ outrage over the NVRA and legislative duplicity over ghost voters never translates into a coherent immigration program that eliminates citizenship guesswork is one of the hallmarks of the rot in this Congress.
