NC Republicans say we need to ban noncitizens from voting. Here are the facts

The Republican Party’s latest “election integrity” crusade? Laws that ban non-citizens from casting a vote.

Of course, noncitizen voting isn’t really happening, but the GOP wants you to think that it is.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship upon registering to vote. It’s a fearmongering tactic designed to make it seem like our elections are under threat. Even the title of the bill — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act — implies that there is some sort of crisis at hand.

Republicans in Congress have not been honest in their framing of the bill. After Wednesday’s vote, U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson said in a post on X that “198 House Democrats voted to let illegal migrants vote in U.S. elections.”

U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, who is running for North Carolina attorney general, made a similar claim. Bishop wrote on X that U.S. Rep. Jeff Jackson, his opponent in the attorney general race, voted against the bill and therefore is “a radical who supports letting illegal immigrants vote in elections.”

Both of these statements obscure an important fact: it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. It’s a crime that can result in imprisonment and even deportation. If this bill does not become law — and President Joe Biden has already said he’ll veto it — it will still be illegal. Failing to pass the bill, or voting against it, is not a permission slip for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. In fact, Congress itself passed a law in 1996 that explicitly bans it.

But Republicans say the bill is needed anyway, despite the fact that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare. There are very few documented cases of noncitizens voting in federal elections, and certainly not nearly enough to affect the outcome. And, when it does happen, those people are removed from the voter rolls or face criminal charges for voting illegally.

There are a small number of municipalities across the country that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, including Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. However, only a few dozen of them choose to exercise that right in the first place, data shows, and those voters are never allowed to participate in state or federal elections.

In fact, not a single state allows noncitizens to vote in state elections, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from trying to stop it. North Carolina is one of several states that will have a citizen-only voting measure on the ballot in November, as state lawmakers have proposed a constitutional amendment to make it clear that only U.S. citizens can vote in state and local elections. Because, apparently, that needs clarifying.

The state constitution already states that “every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized” is eligible to vote in North Carolina, but Republicans insist that isn’t clear enough.

In an op-ed in Fox News, N.C. House Majority Leader John Bell wrote that “10 million illegal immigrants have entered the United States since President Joe Biden took office” and suggested they may be terrorists, members of the Chinese Communist Party or violent criminals who may try to vote in North Carolina’s elections.

There is simply no evidence to suggest that will happen. A post-election audit found that of the 4.8 million ballots cast in North Carolina in the 2016 election, just 41 were cast by noncitizens. 19 people faced federal charges of voter fraud as a result, which suggests that the system is functioning exactly as it should.

It’s curious, too, that Republicans like Bell still believe illegal voting is a threat, considering how much legislation he and his colleagues have already passed purporting to make elections “safer.” When North Carolina Republicans put voter ID on the ballot, we were told that it was to prevent fraudulent votes. The same justification was used for eliminating the grace period for mail-in voting, adding signature verification for absentee ballot envelopes and countless other changes made in recent years.

Despite all those “solutions” Republicans have put forth, the voter fraud “problem” they speak of doesn’t seem to have gotten any smaller. Perhaps that’s just because the problem was never real in the first place.