Republican State Officials Do Trump’s Election Denying Prep Work For Him

State-level Republican officials have been making a big show of the work they are doing to boot alleged non-citizens from the voting rolls — an emphasis that echoes the efforts by presidential candidate Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to stoke pre-election panic about the false and dangerous narrative that non-citizens are voting en masse for Democrats.

Earlier this month, Alabama’s Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) announced that his office had identified over 3,000 alleged non-citizens on the voter rolls. Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) similarly stated in an executive order that officials had found over 6,000 suspected non-citizens on his state’s voter rolls. These announcements gave rise, in turn, to news coverage about the thousands of non-citizen registered voters, perpetuating the narrative that non-citizen voting will be an issue in November and prompting praise from Trump himself. 

Ever since the former president and his allies began signaling that lies about non-citizen voting will play a role in any election-denying schemes this presidential cycle, state lawmakers have been pushing the myth in various ways, including through redundant legislation outlawing non-citizen voting, which is already illegal in federal elections. More recently, red state officials have begun putting out public announcements and executive orders highlighting the work they are doing to remove thousands of supposed non-citizens from voter rolls, and bragging about that work to the press. 

But the messaging campaign is, at best, disingenuous, experts told TPM. These announcements are intentionally vague, and tend to leave out key details about these supposed registered non-citizen voters, they said, prompting fear about the integrity of state voter rolls and perpetuating a myth that there is simply no evidence to support. 

“It is feeding misinformation about the fact of non-citizen voting when we know there’s virtually no non-citizen voting in federal elections,” Alice Clapman, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program. “It has the potential to be very intimidating to voters.”

In a new press release last week, Allen, 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.”

He admitted in the same announcement that “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.”

Youngkin, for his part, signed an executive order that announced the removal of over 6,000 alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls. The order — which Clapman described as perhaps “intentionally vague” — never mentions whether these supposed non-citizens ever actually cast a ballot. The order also never explains whether his office checked the current status of the people removed to confirm that they had not been naturalized. 

Absent from most news coverage of the great 6,000 non-citizen-voters purge was another key fact: the state has removed that number of non-citizens from the voter rolls over the course of the last two years, not suddenly now, in the months leading up to the 2024 election.

Youngkin, nonetheless, described his state’s discovery of the several thousand suspected non-citizens on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, and posted a clip of that interview to X. Trump then heaped praise on Youngkin, stating on social media that he was “TAKING A STRONG LEAD IN SECURING THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER” by “KEEPING ILLEGAL ALIENS THAT HAVE BEEN LET INTO OUR COUNTRY FROM VOTING.”

Youngkin’s office did not offer TPM much in terms of specifics when presented with questions about the details of the removals.

A similar pattern has unfolded in other states. Ohio’s Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) announced this month that county boards of elections across the state were instructed to remove 499 alleged non-citizen from the voter rolls. Justin Levitt, an election law scholar and professor at LMU Loyola Law School, Los Angeles previously told TPM that although some of these removals might very well be part of a normal voter-roll maintenance process, he wouldn’t be surprised “to see this portrayed in a very different way with a lot more exclamation points and a lot more capital letters to try and make it out to something that (it’s) not.”

Not only do states have measures in place to protect their elections from non-citizen voting, there are severe penalties for non-citizens who attempt to vote — including, potentially, deportation.

But perhaps most importantly, there is simply no evidence to suggest this is a problem at all.

“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,” Clapman 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 might be found on the rolls, there is often a reasonable explanation, David Levine, an election integrity consultant, told TPM. For example, in states with automatic voter registration, there’s always the potential that non-citizens will accidentally register, without ever actually attempting to vote. 

“Most times when we see large numbers of people that are said to be on the rolls who are non-citizens, that either is in error in some way or it’s because somebody has made a mistake, but it’s not a sort of intent error,” said Levine. 

Happening alongside this effort by state-level Republicans to amplify the narrative of non-citizen voting, is a larger federal push to do the same.

In May of this year, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other Republican representatives promoted a reductant piece of legislation known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to make it illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. 

“It’s not an accident that this [state-level effort] is happening at the same time that Republicans in Congress are pushing this federal legislation,” Clapman said.