How Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Is Fueling the Election Denial Movement — and Endangering Our Democracy
Among the many tactics being deployed by the anti-democracy movement as it seeks to foment chaos and doubt about the 2024 election has been a wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric centered on the nonexistent threat of widespread illegal voting.
Among the many tactics being deployed by the anti-democracy movement as it seeks to foment chaos and doubt about the 2024 election has been a wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric centered on the nonexistent threat of widespread illegal voting.
Among the many tactics being deployed by the anti-democracy movement as it seeks to foment chaos and doubt about the 2024 election has been a wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric centered on the nonexistent threat of widespread illegal voting.
The xenophobic attacks have gained attention nationwide as election denial activists and politicians advance false claims that voter rolls are being inflated with non-U.S. citizens and pressure officials at all levels of government to advance harmful measures.
Though non-citizens in select jurisdictions have been granted the right to vote in local elections, there is no evidence of widespread illegal voting in federal elections. The far-right fixation on “non-citizen voting” exists at the nexus of election deniers’ voter-fraud preoccupation and the weaponization of anti-immigrant sentiment for political gain, with the anti-democracy movement using such fears to justify the erosion of voting rights and position immigrants as a danger to election integrity.
The most prominent individual behind the conspiracy of non-citizen voting is Cleta Mitchell, founder of the Election Integrity Network and the Only Citizens Vote Coalition. Alongside extremists Stephen Miller and Hans von Spakovsky, Mitchell helped draft the federal SAVE Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has also drafted and promoted model state legislation that would require verification of voters’ citizenship status and make it easier to purge voters, which the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) voted to adopt at their July 2024 meeting.
Documents obtained by American Oversight also show how Election Integrity Network members have claimed that non-citizens have been added to the voter rolls through enrollment in public benefits like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and suggested that there should be greater surveillance of immigrant use of these services.
Mitchell’s focus on immigrant voting is unsurprising. In recent years, Mitchell has prioritized efforts to “clean” voter rolls, as is most evident with her campaign to pressure states to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) and her support of fringe technologies meant to replace ERIC, like EagleAI. (See American Oversight’s 2023 report “The Campaign to Dismantle ERIC.”)
One of Mitchell’s primary attacks of ERIC was that the requirement that participating states mail eligible but unregistered voters information about how to register had the effect of inflating the rolls with Democratic voters — a claim that closely mirrors conspiracy theories that the Democratic Party has pushed non-citizens onto the voter rolls to sway elections.
The push for aggressive “cleaning” of voter rolls has also taken the form of mass voter registration challenges in states across the country that disproportionately affect — and often even directly target — people of color. American Oversight has obtained records of voter challenges submitted by groups and activists like Totes Legit Votes, the Election Integrity Force, and the Election Integrity Network, which use flawed tools like EagleAI, VoteRef, and True the Vote’s IV3.
The false alarmism about non-citizens illegally being added to voter rolls is a natural evolution of the activism around voter challenges and list maintenance, which can have the effect of denying or suppressing the voting rights of communities of color. It also occupies a space in the long history of anti-immigrant sentiment being used for partisan electoral gain. One notable example came in 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing asylum-seekers from the U.S.-Mexico border to sanctuary cities like New York City and Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the purported failure of President Biden’s border policies. That this came during a competitive reelection campaign underscores the likely strategic considerations at play, along with Abbott’s apparent willingness to use immigrant lives to score political points. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also began transporting migrants to other states, and American Oversight obtained related communications between the Texas and Florida governor’s offices, as well as memos outlining flight costs, requisition documents, and purchase orders for the political stunt.
The fearmongering has real and immediate consequences for immigrant communities. With white nationalist conspiracies such as the Great Replacement theory gaining ground in mainstream conservative circles and far-right rhetoric suggesting immigrants are colluding to manipulate election results, immigrants are wrongly cast as an existential threat to U.S. democracy.
The lie has been used before by former President Trump and his allies. Trump’s false claims that he lost the 2016 popular vote because of non-citizen voting laid the groundwork for this latest round. And like other tactics being deployed by the anti-democracy movement — such as last-minute election rule changes or the misguided push for hand counts — the use of anti-immigrant rhetoric to fuel distrust in our elections can sow the same kind of confusion and lies that underpinned the effort to overturn the 2020 election.