Miles Parks for NPR:
For those looking to raise doubts about American elections, it’s becoming clear that a key 2024 voting boogeyman will be immigration.
The false notion that undocumented immigrants are affecting federal elections has been floating around for over 100 years, experts say, but this year, due in part to an increase in migrants at the southern U.S. border, the idea could have new potency.
The narratives are being pushed by prominent right-wing figures including Cleta Mitchell, a former adviser to Donald Trump, along with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee himself.
NPR acquired a two-page memo Mitchell has been circulating laying out “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024.”….
“Allegations of vote fraud were the main stated justification for imposing restrictive practices,” Hayduk said.
And in the century since then, he said, every time the country has seen an influx of immigrants, a loosening of immigration policy or an expansion of voting access, accusations of voter fraud have followed.
Mitchell’s memo about the risk of noncitizen voting touches on two of those things. Migrant encounters at the southern border hit an all-time high in December, and the document focuses mostly on the implementation of a 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act, that made registering to vote easier.
The NVRA does not require proof of U.S. citizenship for people to register to vote, only that potential voters fill out a form and attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens. A federal voting law passed in 2002 also required applicants to provide a unique identification number to register, like a driver’s license or Social Security number, which election officials say effectively serves as a citizenship check since both of those forms of ID involve the government checking whether someone is a citizen or not.
But Mitchell’s main hope, according to the document, is to spur Congress to require documentary proof of citizenship as part of registration.
Experts say that sort of change would have a drastic negative impact on many eligible voters, like naturalized citizens, without solving any real problem.
“If you make [registering] harder, there will be students, young people, elderly people, poor people and other groupings of people who would just not bother,” said Daniels, of the University of Baltimore. “This whole document is [saying] we don’t want the NVRA or any other piece of legislation to do what it’s supposed to do, which is register people to vote.”
Mitchell did not respond to an email from NPR requesting comment