Battleground state election officials push back against noncitizen voting 'myth'

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Battleground state election officials from both parties are pushing back against a falsehood that has proven pervasive ahead of the 2024 reaction: that noncitizens are voting in widespread numbers.

Secretaries of state, election directors, and county officials from six swing states detailed how they ensure that only Americans vote in presidential elections during a conference aimed at stressing the integrity and functionality of the country's election system.

The comments came as former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies have talked up efforts to crack down on noncitizens voting, which is already illegal.

“I worked for years researching the noncitizen issue, and found that it occurred very, very, very infrequently,” said Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the commonwealth in Pennsylvania, detailing his review of the voter rolls in Philadelphia, where he served as an election commissioner, and later the commonwealth itself.

The handful of noncitizens who did appear on the voter rolls had registered when interacting with the Department of Transportation. Schmidt said they changed the computer screen prompts so that noncitizens wouldn’t be asked if they wanted to register to vote, and went on to verify the citizenship status of those who had registered despite data indicating they were a noncitizen at one point.

In Michigan, automatic voter registration ensures that voters who are providing documentation to get their driver’s license “are showing whether or not they’re citizens and if they are, if they, for example, present a green card or some other document that shows they’re not a citizen, they’re marked in our state voter registration database,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Benson, a Democrat, said the “myth of noncitizen voting” was part of a broader “narrative” being pushed that there are ineligible voters on the rolls.

“There is an effort to promote a narrative that somehow there are scores of ineligible voters registered, ineligible people on our registration list,” Benson said, citing a spate of lawsuits alleging bloated voter rolls in battleground states. “And then related to that, of course, is that the myth of noncitizens participating in federal elections.”

The officials — brought together by longtime election lawyers Bob Bauer and Ben Ginsberg and nonprofits Keep Our Republic and Pillars of The Community, which seek to support the American election system — spent hours Thursday talking about everything from voter registration to result certification.

In Arizona, voters must show documentary proof of citizenship to cast a ballot in state elections; those who don’t show proof but swear to their citizenship are able to vote in federal elections. A system quirk recently discovered nearly 100,000 Arizona residents who registered to vote before the documentary proof of citizenship requirement was required. Maricopa County has sued seeking clarity on whether those voters can vote in state and local elections this fall.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, stressed the proactive audits his office has taken to verify citizenship. He advised other states to implement photo ID requirements and constitutional amendments that would explicitly state that only citizens can vote.

“We can say there’s not noncitizen voting, but it’s out there,” he said of the narrative. “And so over 20 months ago, I was the first person in the country that do a 100% citizenship verification of our voting rolls.”

Raffensperger said his efforts help voters trust the integrity of the election.

“When I come back to my fellow Georgians and say, folks, noncitizens are not voting here in Georgia, we’re finishing up our second audit. We’ll have that result in a few weeks, so that we can have high confidence that only American citizens are voting in our elections,” he said.

Republicans at the national and state level have fueled unfounded noncitizen voting claims in the run-up to this year's presidential election.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has championed legislation to require documentary proof of citizenship nationally, while Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has made baseless claims of millions of migrants registering the vote.

Election officials said Thursday they were taking steps to debunk conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 election.

Some said they're producing elections differently this year, hoping to undermine misinformation before it begins by considering the optics and visuals in their work.

"Sometimes it's just good procedure, and it increases your transparency too, when you effectively label containers so that they know what's in that container, especially if it's not a clear container," said Karen Brinson Bell, North Carolina's top elections official. "It's just taking steps to think about, how do we convey the checks and balances and the processes that we have in place?"

Not all conspiracy theories can be prevented, though, countered Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer. A conservative blog has repeatedly reported based on the county's livestreams that Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a state official, was inside the county's tabulation center, though she was not. (In Arizona, tabulation is done at the county level.)

"I talked to HR about this, and I said, can we just keep out any lady with sort of shorter length, light brown hair? And we were told we couldn't do that," joked Richer, a Republican.

Still, he said, county staff try not to make "unforced errors" by doing anything that might be misconstrued — like bringing pens into the tabulator center or entering the ballot counting area alone.

"We kind of operate under the tagline that perception is the new reality," said Kim Pytleski, a clerk from Oconto County, Wisconsin. "We act intentionally, when we're doing things at the polling place. So when we're breaking a seal, which is part of our protocol to do, we are being vocal about it: 'We're breaking seal 1234.'"