ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Battleground state election officials from both parties are pushing back against a widely held lie ahead of the 2024 backlash: that noncitizens are voting in large numbers.
Secretaries of state, election directors and county officials from six swing states detailed how they ensure only Americans vote in presidential elections during a conference aimed at highlighting the integrity and functionality of the nation’s election system.
The comments came after discussing the efforts of former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies pressure non-citizens to voteit is already illegal.
“I’ve studied the non-citizen issue for years and I’ve found that it happens very, very, very rarely,” said Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the union in Pennsylvania, detailing his review of voter rolls in Philadelphia. the election commissioner and then the union itself.
A handful of noncitizens who appeared on voter rolls were registered when contacting the Department of Transportation. Schmidt said they changed computer screen prompts so that non-citizens were not asked if they wanted to register to vote, and continued to check the citizenship status of those registered despite reports indicating they were stateless at one point.
Automatic voter registration in Michigan requires voters who apply for a driver’s license to “indicate whether they are citizens and whether they have, for example, a green card or other document. ‘are not citizens, they are registered in our state voter registration database,’ said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
Benson, a Democrat, said the “myth of non-citizen voting” is part of a larger “narrative” that there are ineligible voters on the rolls.
“There’s an effort to promote a narrative that we have a large number of ineligible voters, ineligible people, registered on our registration list,” Benson said, citing a series of lawsuits over bloated voter rolls in battleground states. “And related to that, of course, is the myth of non-citizens participating in federal elections.”
The officials, brought together by longtime election lawyers Bob Bauer and Ben Ginsberg and nonprofits trying to shore up the American election system, spent hours Thursday talking about everything from voter registration to certifying results.
In Arizona, voters must show documentary proof of citizenship to vote in state elections; Those who do not show proof but swear to their citizenship can vote in federal elections. A recently discovered system quirk about 100,000 Arizona residents Previously, documentary proof of registered citizenship was required to vote. Maricopa County sued to clarify whether those voters can vote in state and local elections this fall.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, emphasized the proactive checks his office conducts to verify citizenship. It recommended that other states implement photo ID requirements and constitutional changes it would make it clear that only citizens could vote.
“We might say there’s no non-citizen vote, but it’s there,” he said. “And so, more than 20 months ago, I became the first person in the country to verify 100% of our ballots for citizenship.”
Raffensperger said his efforts help voters trust the integrity of the election.
“When I return to my Georgian compatriots and say that citizens and non-citizens do not vote in Georgia, we are finishing our second inspection. We will get this result in a few weeks so that we have high confidence that only American citizens voted in our elections.
Nationally and statewide, Republicans have stepped up their case for noncitizen voting ahead of this year’s presidential election.
House Speaker Mike Johnson championed legislation to require documentary proof of citizenship nationwide, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton unfounded claims millions of migrants vote.
Election officials said Thursday they are taking steps to debunk conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 election.
Some said they were framing the election differently this year, with optics and visuals in their work, hoping to disrupt misinformation before it starts.
“Sometimes it’s just good procedure and it increases your transparency when you effectively label containers so they know what’s in that container, especially if it’s not a clear container,” said Karen Brinson Bell, North Carolina’s top elections representative. “It’s just taking steps to think, how do we deliver checks and balances and existing processes?”
Not all conspiracy theories can be ruled out, though Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer countered. A conservative blog has repeatedly reported, based on live broadcasts of the county, that Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, though not a state official, was inside the county’s schedule center. (In Arizona, tabulations are done at the county level.)
“I talked to HR about it and said, ‘Can we keep out any ladies with shorter, lighter brown hair? We were told we couldn’t,'” joked Richer, a Republican.
Still, he said, county employees try not to make “forced errors” by doing anything that could be misunderstood — like bringing pens to the tabulation center or walking into the ballot counting area alone.
“We operate under the motto that perception is the new reality,” said Officer Kim Pytleski of Oconto County, Wisconsin. “When we do business at the polling station, we act deliberately. So when we break the seal that’s part of our protocol, we’re vocal about it: ‘We’re breaking the 1234 seal.'”