For months now, Republicans have been setting the stage to cry voter fraud in the event of a possible Donald Trump loss — warning specifically about the supposed dangers of non-citizens voting.
However, unsurprisingly, outrage over non-citizens supposedly voting en masse for Democrats, and general, run-of-the-mill claims of voter fraud, have practically disappeared since Trump’s victory in last week’s election.
Instead, when asked about the issue, Republicans have been pushing the false narrative that the only reason supposed non-citizen voting did not disrupt last week’s election is because GOP lawmakers, learning from the “chaos” of the 2020 election, passed legislation to protect against this threat — an argument barely rooted in reality.
During a press briefing on Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) addressed a question from a reporter about how non-citizen voting impacted last week’s election, by crediting Republicans for ostensibly eradicating the issue after states passed legislation “to shore up their systems” and protect against this supposed threat.
Johnson also said that the election was simply “too big to rig,” referencing a frequently repeated line from Trump.
“It is a fact that non-citizens voted in some places around the country…” he said. “I had confidence that because of the chaos related to the 2020 election, most of the states got busy, legislatures in the states got busy and passed legislation to shore up their systems in states around the country.”
The Republican obsession with the non-existent threat of non-citizen voting will likely be used again to stoke fear about the safety and integrity of the election system in future elections, as it was this cycle. Johnson himself put forward irrelevant legislation that passed the House this summer that would ban non-citizens from voting in federal elections, something that is already illegal and barely happens. The bill was dead on arrival in the Senate.
Last week, voters approved Republican-backed measures in Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin, enshrining in those states’ constitutions that it is, in fact, illegal for non-citizens to vote in elections. This is something that is already illegal in these 8 states, and at the federal level. But that did not stop Republicans from creating an environment of hysteria around the issue ahead of the election last week.
“Instead of this being about evidence and facts … the whole thing is just weaponized basically to justify … your side should always win and should always have the stay in power and so on,” said Yotam Ophir, a professor of communication at the University at Buffalo who focuses on misinformation and extremism.
Johnson is not the only one trying to rewrite history in the face of Trump’s win.
“Voter fraud claims disappeared immediately,” Darrell West, senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation within the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institute, told TPM. “As soon as Trump started to win, the Republicans did not want to discredit their own victory, so suddenly it became a free and fair election.”
Early on Election Day, before Trump’s victory became apparent, Trump baselessly claimed that there was “massive cheating” in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia District Attorney quickly shut down the “unfounded claim,” saying there is no “factual basis” for the claim and that the allegation itself was “wild.” Since Trump won the election, of course, there hasn’t been another word on the supposed “massive cheating” scandal that plagued Philadelphia.
Although the usual Stop the Steal voices have been quiet about the integrity of the 2024 election, they have used Trump’s victory to somehow prove that there was in fact fraud in the 2020 election.
The conspiracy theorist behind the widely debunked film “2000 Mules” Dinesh D’Souza, for example, was quick to claim in a viral post on X that “15 million Democratic votes appeared in 2020 and immediately disappeared after that.” Another viral post on X also highlighted the number of votes Joe Biden received in 2020, claiming that the 2020 election was therefore “rigged.”
“We continue to see from sore losers, false allegations of fraud without any evidence,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel for the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told TPM. “I think the attempt to disaggregate certain races and then claim fraud is reflective of, again, what we’ve been talking about, which is partisan motivation for false allegations of fraud and not anything related to fact or evidence.”
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