Louisiana Joins Other Red States In Making A Big Show Of Preventing So-Called Non-Citizen Voting

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.