Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order on Monday requiring all Louisiana government agencies that hand out voter registration forms to include a written declaration that non-citizens are prohibited from registering to vote or voting in elections.
“The right to vote in United States elections is a privilege that’s reserved for American citizens,” Landry said during the Monday press conference. “In Louisiana, election integrity is a top priority.”
Louisiana is just the most recent state to implement measures to ensure that individuals who are not American citizens are not voting in U.S. elections, even though there is simply no evidence to suggest that non-citizen voting is a real problem.
It is, of course, already illegal for non-citizens to vote in state, federal or even most local elections, and states themselves have measures in place to protect their elections from non-citizen voting, including severe penalties for doing so, like the risk of deportation.
“It is not something that anyone has an incentive to do given the severe penalties and the fact that we’re talking about casting a single vote,” Alice Clapman, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, previously told TPM. “It is feeding the disinformation that this is a problem, which obviously has become a talking point of the Trump campaign and frankly other political campaigns.”
In the rare instances where a non-citizen is found on the rolls, there is often a reasonable explanation, experts told TPM. For example, in states with automatic voter registration, there’s always a chance that non-citizens might accidentally get registered when completing other types of legal paperwork, even though they never attempted to vote.
Republicans’ new obsession with supposedly curbing alleged non-citizens voting is an extension of the rhetorical efforts by Donald Trump and his MAGA allies to stoke fears about election fraud in case the former president loses his third bid for the White House. It’s reminiscent of his efforts before and after the 2020 election to manufacture hysteria around mail-in voting and other pandemic mitigation measures, and in a way, it’s an extension of the Big Lie.
In May, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other House MAGA Republicans introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would make it illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, an act that is already illegal. That passed the House in July but, predictably, was not picked up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Emboldened by Trump and House Republicans, red state officials have begun putting out public announcements and executive orders highlighting the supposed work they are doing to remove thousands of non-citizens from voter rolls — while also intentionally avoiding specifics about their methodology or whether any of these individuals actually tried to vote.
Earlier this month, the Alabama secretary of state, announced the implementation of a process to remove alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls. In that announcement, he noted that he had identified over 3,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls “who are registered to vote in Alabama who have been issued non-citizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security.”
In the same announcement, he admitted “it is possible that some of the individuals who were issued non-citizen identification numbers have, since receiving them, become naturalized citizens and are, therefore, eligible to vote.”
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin also signed an executive order, announcing the removal of over 6,000 alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls in August. The order, however, did not mention if these alleged non-citizens ever cast a ballot in an election.
Similarly, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) recently announced that county boards of elections across the state were instructed to remove 499 alleged non-citizen from the voter rolls, out of the 8 million registered voters in the state.
Imagining problems then offering putative solutions that probably wouldn’t solve it even if it was real is an integral part of the authoritarian playbook. Part of the struggle in dealing with these proposals, and one of things that makes it so exhausting, is you have to start by trying to get them to actually offer evidence.
This necessarily involves some recognition that the problem they are really trying to solve is not the problem they have stated which in this case is not non-citizen voting but too many citizens of a certain demographic voting in a way they don’t like.
ETA: this is another pernicious example of what the economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, called “convenient reverse logic.” In a talk to the 1984 graduates of the American University’s College of Public and International Affairs* he outlined its logic: Rather than moving from cause to effect and diagnosis to remedy, a remedy consistent with political interests was identified and then a cause which would make that remedy relevant was identified or, if necessary, invented.
The examples Galbraith used were not surprisingly from the Reagan administration. For example poverty was characterized as lack of motivation and drug abuse rather than the absence of better schools, healthcare, and affirmative action so expanding the drug war was justified. Similarly characterizing unrest in Central America as inspired by outside agitators and communism rather than a history of militarized oligarchies made the sale of military supplies and armed intervention suitable instead of logical but less desirable remedies like pushing for and supporting legal, land and economic reform, etc.
*became a chapter in Galbraith’s 1986 book, A View from the Stands
This is what you do when you lose, are losing or expect to lose.
You accuse the other side of cheating even before the first pitch is thrown or the first vote cast.
If Trump and Republicans expected to win, they would not be doing this.
The are also working hard to keep Pookas from voting. Hate it when the six-foot tall rabbits think they can influence our democracy.
Fixed it for the TPM headline writers.
Utterly off subject
But I like truth
In this article the author claims chocolate pods are the size of pumpkins. Look at the image. That is about 400 gm Maximum wet weight for a chocolate pod. A simple google search reveals this…
"Characteristics commonly used to define pumpkin include smooth and slightly ribbed skin and deep yellow to orange color, although white, green, and other pumpkin colors also exist. While Cucurbita pepo pumpkins generally weigh between 3 and 8 kilograms (6 and 18 lb), giant pumpkins can exceed a tonne in mass.
Cocoa pods weigh an average of 400 g (14 oz) and each one yields 35 to 40 g (1.2 to 1.4 oz) dried beans; this yield is 9–10% of the total weight in the pod. One person can separate the beans from about 2000 pods per day. The wet beans are then transported to a facility so they can be fermented and dried."
… … … … … … …
bbc news got it wrong. I tried to send a comment to them to point this out yet they would not accept my gently worded commentary saying I was the one with an error. Yet a small pumpkin is five to six times, roughly, the weight of a chocolate pod. bbcnews is the one who is in error. Also chocolate seeds are not sweet. They have no sugar content to begin with. That is added in processing. Biting into a chocolate seed would prove my point to the author. Obviously the author has zero understanding of the subject.
Thank you for letting me vent.
I’ll see myself out now.