Even Before Polls, MAGA Supporters Sue Claiming Non-Citizens Might Vote

Photo: Reuters Brendan McDermid

WASHINGTON, DC (REUTERS) – Donald Trump and his Republican allies are ratcheting up baseless claims that the November 5 presidential election could be skewed by widespread voting by non-citizens in a series of lawsuits that democracy advocates say are meant to sow distrust.

At least eight lawsuits have been filed challenging voter registration procedures in four of the seven swing states expected to decide the election contest between Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump and his allies say the legal campaign, which includes a wide-ranging challenge to the citizenship status of voters in Arizona, is a defense of election integrity.

But their court filings offer little evidence of the phenomenon that independent studies show to be too rare to affect election results, legal experts said.

“The former president is trying to do what he’s done the last three times he’s run and set up this ‘If I win the election is valid and if I lose the election was rigged’ narrative,” said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat. Apart from his more recent presidential bids, Trump briefly ran in 2000 for the Reform Party.

The Trump campaign referred a request for comment to a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, who said, “We believe our lawsuits will stop non-citizen voting, which threatens American votes.”

It is a felony offense for a non-citizen to vote in a federal election and independent studies, have shown it rarely happens.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, told a congressional panel last week that non-citizen voting is a rarity, but that enforcement is necessary to keep it that way. He said his office recently identified nearly 600 non-citizens from state voter rolls that contain about 8 million registrants in total.

A study of Trump’s false claims of widespread non-citizen voting in the 2016 presidential election showed only 30 incidents among 23.5 million ballots cast, accounting for 0.0001% of the vote, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University said.