OPINION: False claims of noncitizen voting are real attempt to disrupt election | Grumet
Only once in his 12 years as Travis County voter registrar has Bruce Elfant referred such a matter to prosecutors — and even then, the incident turned out to be a mistake, someone checking off the wrong box.
Noncitizens appearing on the voter rolls are really that rare.
"We just haven't seen any instance of this," Elfant told me.
Indeed, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice calls noncitizen voting "vanishingly rare." Other election experts say such cases "are virtually nonexistent," especially since states have multiple systems to verify people are eligible to vote. While a few instances of noncitizen voting have happened in our nation of more than 160 million voters, the Libertarian Cato Institute says "there is no good evidence" it is happening at any meaningful scale.
And that makes sense: The penalties for noncitizens who try to vote include fines, up to a year in prison and most importantly, deportation, losing the promise of a life in America that immigrants have worked so hard to reach. Why risk all of that just to cast a ballot?
Yet the fearmongering over noncitizen voting is really having a moment. Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have stirred up the issue recently without offering any proof, and Austin-area U.S. Rep. Chip Roy is among the congressional Republicans who are, quite incredibly, driving us toward a shutdown of the federal government over this virtually nonexistent problem.
The endgame is obvious: Dredge up suspicion that noncitizens are voting, then use that phony complaint to argue against accepting the results of the November election if Donald Trump loses his presidential bid.
At that point, claims of noncitizen voting, however weak, "can be used as an excuse to disrupt the certification process" of the election results or "generally disrupt the peaceful transfer of power," Claudia Ruiz, a senior civil rights policy analyst at UnidosUS, told me and other journalists on a call Friday.
What a dirty ploy: Claim to protect elections when you're really looking to challenge the results.
To be clear, such an effort runs counter to the careful work done by the local officials who maintain the voter rolls, people like Elfant and his counterparts around the country.
"I have yet to meet a Democrat that wants ineligible voters on their lists, and I have yet to meet a Republican that wants to take eligible voters off their list," David Becker, head of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me and other journalists Friday. Ensuring the correct people are on the rolls "is something that election officials agree on 100%."
But Trump's enablers want to sow doubt and confusion. Late last month, Abbott alleged that 6,500 potential noncitizens had been identified on Texas' voter rolls over the past three years, a declaration designed to grab headlines without offering proof.
"It appears that there are definitely citizens on that list," Becker said, "and (Texas officials) have so far refused to release any documentary evidence, anything about the methodology to reach that number — which calls into question whether or not there is any issue there at all."
This past week, Paxton urged Secretary of State Jane Nelson to ask the feds for help verifying the citizenship of more than 1 million Texas voters (Nelson's office said it already had such an inquiry in the works). It's a baffling request. Nelson's office already has access to the state's driver's license database, which includes information on the proof of citizenship a person provided when getting their ID, as well as the federal Social Security database and other records. The secretary of state's office already checks those records when someone is first added to the voter rolls.
If Paxton was making a good-faith effort to ensure an accurate roster of voters, he would have raised the question months ago. We're now well within the 90-day blackout period before an election, when federal law prohibits officials from sweeping people off the voter rolls.
Plainly, Paxton is not trying to improve this election, but to cast doubt on it.
Which brings us to the Safeguard American Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, championed by Roy and other congressional Republicans who have threatened to withhold the funding to keep the federal government operating after the end of September unless the SAVE Act is part of the package.
The SAVE Act makes noncitizen voting a crime — fact check: It already is a crime — while making voter registration more difficult, supposedly to prevent noncitizen voting that "happens so rarely that even the states that are trying to find it can't find it ," Becker said.
Trump is clamoring for a standoff over the SAVE Act, even though a government shutdown typically means air traffic controllers working without pay, tens of thousands of federal employees being placed on furloughs, inspections by the Food and Drug Administration getting delayed and services being suspended at our beloved national parks.
All to protest a problem that doesn't exist.
Pay attention to these claims of noncitizen voting. Not because they are credible, but because those behind them are serious about disrupting this election.
Grumet is the Statesman's Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at or on X at Find her previous work at statesman.com/opinion/columns .
