Donald Trump and his Republican allies are stepping up baseless accusations that the November 5 US presidential election could be distorted by widespread voting by non-Americans, in a series of lawsuits that democracy activists say are aimed at sowing distrust.
At least eight lawsuits have been filed challenging voter registration procedures in four of the seven battleground states that are expected to decide the election race between Trump and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump and his allies say the legal campaign, which includes a broad challenge to the citizenship status of voters in Arizona, is a defense of election integrity.
But their lawsuits offer little evidence of a phenomenon that independent studies show is too rare to affect election outcomes, legal experts say.
“The former president is trying to do what he did the last three times he ran and create this narrative of ‘if I win, the election is valid and if I lose, the election was rigged,’” said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat.
In addition to his most recent presidential bids, Trump briefly ran in 2000 for the Reform Party.
The Trump campaign referred a request for comment to a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, who said: “We believe our lawsuits will prevent non-citizen voting, which threatens American votes.”
It is a crime for a non-citizen to vote in a federal election, and according to independent studies, this rarely happens.
Defenders of Trump’s strategy argue that even one illegal ballot is too many.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, told a congressional panel last week that noncitizen voting is a rarity but that oversight is needed to maintain that status quo.
He said his office recently identified about 600 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, which contain about 8 million registered voters in total.
“We found 135 this year who had voted. We found another 400 who were registered but hadn’t voted yet. And this idea that it’s already illegal? It’s illegal to hijack airplanes, but we haven’t gotten rid of the TSA,” LaRose said.
A study of Trump’s false claims about widespread non-citizen voting in the 2016 presidential election found just 30 incidents among 23.5 million ballots cast, representing 0.0001% of the vote, according to New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.
This content was originally published in Trump and allies file lawsuits before election saying non-citizens will be able to vote on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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