In a series of lawsuits that democracy advocates argue are intended to sow mistrust, Donald Trump and his Republican allies are ramping up their fabricated allegations that widespread voting by non-citizens voting could distort the U.S. presidential election on November 5. At least eight lawsuits contesting voter registration practices have been filed in four of the seven battleground states where Trump and Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris are expected to face off in the election.

According to Trump and his allies, the legal battle is a defense of election integrity and involves a broad challenge to Arizona voters' citizenship status. However, legal experts noted that their court filings provide scant proof of the phenomena, which independent research indicate is too uncommon to have an impact on election outcomes.

Response from Officials

Democrat Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the secretary of state of New Mexico, stated, "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." In addition to his recent presidential campaigns, Trump ran briefly for the Reform Party in 2000. A Republican National Committee spokesman responded to a request for comment from the Trump campaign by saying, "We believe our lawsuits will stop non-citizen voting, which threatens American votes."

Voting in a federal election as a non-citizen is illegal, and independent research has revealed that this rarely occurs. Supporters of Trump's strategy argue that one fraudulent vote is too many.

Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose stated before a congressional subcommittee last week that while non-citizen voting is uncommon, it must be enforced in order to remain that way. According to him, his agency has recently discovered perhaps 600 non-citizens on the state voter rolls, which have a total of about 8 million registrants. "We found 135 this year that had voted. We found another 400 that were registered but hadn't yet voted. And this idea that it's already illegal? It's illegal to hijack airplanes, but we don't get rid of the TSA," LaRose stated.

The Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University reported that a research refuting Trump's false allegations of widespread non-citizen voting in the 2016 presidential election revealed only 30 incidences out of 23.5 million ballots cast, or 0.0001% of the total vote.

Legal Warnings

The U.S. Justice Department warned states last week that federal law forbids mass modifications to voter lists within 90 days before an election, as well as purges that target certain voter classes, such recently naturalised citizens.

Democracy supporters claim that this fact demonstrates that the goal of Trump and his allies' lawsuits is not to win significant changes in the electorate but rather to set the stage for challenging specific state outcomes in the event of a loss in court and by attempting to influence elected officials to take action.

"Lawsuits over non-citizens on voter registration rolls are meritless. But they're part of a weaponized public relations campaign to erode confidence in elections," according to Dax Goldstein, senior counsel of the nonpartisan United Democracy Centre of the United States, which advocates for fair and secure elections.

non-citizens voting
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Election Competition in Key States

Although Harris appears to have a modest advantage over Trump according to national opinion polls, such as the Reuters/Ipsos poll, the contest is close in the seven most competitive states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

If Harris' victory hinged on just one or two states, a successful Trump challenge to a defeat in those states could be enough to change the election's outcome.

"Our elections are coming down to just dozens or hundreds of votes," said Republican Representative Anthony D'Esposito, who is running for re-election in a hotly contested New York district. "If one person that is not an American citizen has the ability to vote in our election, there is a serious problem."

The lawsuits, filed by the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, the allied America First Legal Foundation, and Republican state attorneys general, primarily target state and county election processes, claiming that officials are not doing enough to prevent non-citizens from registering or remaining on voter rolls.

Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and an expert on election law, believes that the lawyers pursuing these challenges should use more cautious language than Trump and his followers when describing them.

Previous Attempts

Trump unsuccessfully attempted to overturn his 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden through a campaign that included more than 60 lawsuits and fuelled his followers' Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol.

Nearly all of Trump and his allies' 2020 lawsuits were dropped due to a lack of proof and other concerns.

Four lawsuits filed this year in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Texas allege that a 2021 Biden administration plan involving federal agencies to increase voter registration is a politicised campaign to register Democratic voters.
A 41-page complaint filed in Kansas federal court by Republican attorneys general from nine states contains only one mention of unauthorised immigrants voting, claiming that the Biden administration neglected to investigate the risks of "illegal aliens" attempting to register to vote.

Challenges in North Carolina and Arizona

The RNC and the North Carolina Republican Party have twice sued the election board in that battleground state, alleging non-citizen voting. According to the claims, the state registered approximately 225,000 voters, or about 3% of the total, with insufficient paperwork and failed to remove persons who self-identified as non-citizens upon reporting for jury duty from the lists.

The state is politically divided, with two Republican senators, a Republican-controlled legislature, a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, and an evenly split delegation to the United States House of Representatives.
Patrick Gannon, a state elections board spokeswoman, stated that the board had met the jury duty requirement by identifying nine registered voters who claimed not to be citizens.

Those nine would be asked to cancel their registrations if their citizenship status cannot be validated, Gannon said, adding that the state cannot force them off the lists so close to Election Day.
In Arizona, a lawsuit filed by Trump-aligned advocacy group America First Legal seeks to compel counties to conduct further investigations into approximately 44,000 voters (about 1% of the statewide total) who were allowed to register without submitting proof of citizenship.

The controversy centres on the state's two-tiered voter registration system, which requires evidence of US citizenship to vote in state elections but not in federal elections. Even some long-time Arizona political professionals believe non-citizen voting poses no threat to municipal elections.

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