If Trump Loses Again, Republicans Are Ready to Falsely Blame Immigrants
The Republican Party, conservative politicians, and right-wing groups allied with Donald Trump are using exceedingly rare instances of voting by undocumented immigrants as pretext to try to purge more than one million voters from the rolls in battleground states, just weeks before the election — in open defiance of federal voting laws.
These efforts to disenfranchise voters are unlikely to succeed — and one such case has already been tossed out of court. If the cases continue to fail, as expected, and Trump loses the November election, the former president and his allies clearly plan to use those failures to attempt to substantiate their claims that the election was stolen from them.
Pro-Trump legal battalions have filed nearly 50 lawsuits across the country claiming, with little basis, that as many as 1.4 million voters are illegally registered to vote, according to a review of filings by Rolling Stone and American Doom. Some of the lawsuits claim that thousands of undocumented immigrants are among the allegedly ineligible voters in key battleground states; Trump and Republicans have repeatedly and publicly argued, without evidence, that undocumented immigrants will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
It’s a pernicious theory — one that combines the two storylines that have been central to both Trump’s political career and his 2024 campaign pitch: the racist idea that undocumented immigrants are ruining America, and the false notion that Democrats intend to rely on their illegal votes to steal elections from Republicans.
The idea that Democrats want to encourage migrants to come to America in order to secure their votes is part of the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. It has no basis in truth. Studies have shown that undocumented immigrants voting in elections is an exceedingly rare occurrence — likely because it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. That hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies from making the claim as part of their plans to contest a Harris win in November.
“I’ve been doing a little something […] to make sure that only legal citizens are voting here in the United States of America,” Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, said at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5. “If you’re an illegal citizen and you’re voting in our election, we’ll track you down and prosecute you to the full extent of the law, and you’re leaving this country. How’s that sound? Don’t do it. It’s not worth it.”
States are not allowed to systematically purge the voter rolls close to an election, which is why some Democrats see the lawsuits as efforts to support Trump’s campaign messaging rather than actual attempts to “clean” voter rolls.
On Friday, a federal judge in Arizona dismissed a voter-purge lawsuit brought by Trump’s allies at the America First Legal Foundation by noting the group had filed its suit too late.
America First Legal’s lawyers argued that “tens of thousands” of voters should be removed from the rolls — saying some could be undocumented immigrants. The group “waited until shortly before the election to file this lawsuit despite allegedly suffering irreparable harm since Arizona’s 2022 voter list maintenance laws went into effect,” Judge Krissa M. Lanham wrote in her order dismissing the lawsuit.
In several cases, Republican and right-wing lawyers appear to be purposefully “slow-walking” their voter-purge lawsuits so that they won’t be resolved by Election Day, a Harris campaign advisor says. The lawsuits are simply “press releases thinly disguised as legal filings,” per the advisor.
America First Legal “waited 41 days after” filing its lawsuit to explicitly say what they demanded from election officials, noted Lanham, who was appointed by President Joe Biden in May.
Among the 50 “list maintenance” lawsuits, as Republicans call them, are at least 12 that explicitly claim undocumented immigrants could be voting in elections, Rolling Stone and American Doom found.
In North Carolina, the Republican National Committee has sued the state election board, saying that concerns over “noncitizen voting are particularly salient during this election cycle given the unprecedented millions of people who have illegally immigrated into the United States — apparently relocating, in many cases, to North Carolina.”
In Arizona, America First Legal didn’t cite any evidence of undocumented immigrants voting in large numbers — just voters’ feelings about the issue. Sixty percent of voters there “are concerned that cheating will affect the outcome of the 2024 election,” the group noted in the introduction in its lawsuit.
A wide-ranging and bipartisan variety of experts, election officials, think tanks, and judges have found that voting by noncitizens is exceptionally rare. In March, The Washington Post noted that the conservative Heritage Foundation’s database of 2 billion votes from federal elections shows just 85 cases of alleged noncitizen voting between 2002 and 2023. In that time, hundreds of millions of votes were cast.
“I have never seen a single iota of evidence to support the allegation that noncitizens are voting in any significant number,” Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Voting Rights Project at Lawyers’ Committee, tells Rolling Stone and American Doom. The Lawyers’ Committee is among several groups that filed a motion to intervene in one of the Republican National Committee’s lawsuits claiming the North Carolina State Board of Elections has not properly maintained voter rolls. “I don’t know if it’s games-playing or it’s worse,” he says.
In addition to narrative-building, Republicans and right-wing groups are also running afoul of federal voting rights law, Democrats say. Of the dozens of lawsuits are 28 that were filed within 90 days before the November election; the National Voter Registration Act stipulates a “quiet period” of 90 days before an election in which “any program that systematically removes the names of ineligible voters” from voter rolls must stop.
So, if Republicans are going to lose lawsuits simply because they filed them too late, why file them at all?
TRUMP’S NARRATIVE ABOUT undocumented immigrants voting in elections began immediately after he won the 2016 election over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Then, in a meeting with members of Congress, Trump claimed without evidence that three to five million votes came from undocumented immigrants, and that this was why he lost the popular vote to Clinton. (The election task force Trump stood up as president to find evidence of noncitizen voting was dissolved after failing to prove the claims.)
Since 2016, claims of undocumented immigrants voting in elections has grown from a relatively obscure hypothesis to mainstream Republican belief.
Following his loss in 2020, Trump and key allies like his lawyer Rudy Guiliani began pushing the lie that undocumented immigrants had voted in large numbers. At the rally on Jan. 6, 2021 that preceded the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Trump claimed that over “36,000 ballots were illegally cast by noncitizens” in Arizona. In a revised indictment over Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, special prosecutor Jack Smith said this was one of the claims of illegal voting that Trump, Giuliani, and others made up “from whole cloth.”
In July, Republicans in the House passed the SAVE Act, which requires proof of citizenship to register to vote — something most states already require — resulting in several conservative states mimicking the law to enact similar laws of their own. The SAVE Act, which failed in the Senate, was urged forward by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who cited a small-sample study citing voting data claiming a little more than 6 percent of noncitizens had voted in the 2008 presidential election. When Johnson was asked to back up his claims based on the study, he claimed clairvoyance.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not something that is easily provable,” he said.
Since then, the issue of noncitizens voting in elections has further proliferated on the American right. Activists have organized around the issue, saying they should scour voter rolls looking for “ethnic names,” according to The New York Times. A Trump-allied group has taken out Spanish-language ads in swing states warning that voting by noncitizens is a crime, NBC News reported.
Then there is Trump himself, who regularly claims that Democrats are purposefully allowing in migrants in order to get them to vote for the party’s candidates. Trump teed up the issue to millions of Americans at his lone debate with Harris last month.
“Our elections are bad,” Trump said at the debate. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”
Trump has continued to lie about Democrats wanting undocumented immigrants registered to vote for Harris on the campaign trail: “You know, they’re trying to get them on the voter rolls,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan on Oct. 3. “We cannot let that happen.”
Max Flugrath of the left-leaning voting rights group, Fair Fight, says this isn’t happening — and that efforts by Trump and others to portray the election as rife with fraud because of undocumented immigrants is simply a political ploy to explain a loss in November.
“The Republican lawsuits being filed to support their mass voter-purge attempts don’t seem designed to win in court,” Flugrath tells Rolling Stone and American Doom. “It looks like their real goal is to create a narrative that Trump and the MAGA operation can use to legitimize their lies about voter fraud and contest the election — it’s the same old, tired playbook that Americans saw through in 2020.”
LAST WEEK, LARA TRUMP doubled down on her claim about voting by undocumented immigrants in a campaign fundraising email, citing “experts” who have claimed “as many as 2.7 million illegals could vote in November.” The statement appears to refer to a similar claim made by John Agresti, who describes himself as a “a former atheist who became a Christian after reading the Bible over the course of a year and finding objective evidence for its accuracy.”
Agresti cited the same study as Johnson, the House speaker. Other studies have found that noncitizen voting is nearly non-existent — as have election officials. In Georgia, for instance, Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger (R) found in 2022 that 1,634 noncitizens had registered to vote. None cast a ballot.
Some Republican politicians are leading public battles with the Biden administration to try to support their narrative about noncitizen voting. Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Monday, demanding that the agency provide citizenship information for nearly half a million registered voters in the state.
“Texans are increasingly concerned about the possibility of noncitizen voting, and I have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of our elections,” Paxton wrote in the letter.
For its part, the federal government has responded to attempts to purge voter rolls within the NVRA’s quiet period by suing secretaries of state in Virginia and Alabama.
Democrats believe Republicans’ attempts in court to argue that voter rolls are full of ineligible voters — including undocumented immigrants — are simply a ploy to lay the groundwork for stolen election claims to come.
“These lawsuits are completely meritless and designed only to try to undermine our democracy and voters’ confidence in it,” reads a Harris campaign memo from May. “They’re trying to plant the seeds of doubt and confusion in hopes of harvesting them when voters reject Donald Trump again in November.”
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