Still the only voter ID anyone should need
True the Vote, the right-wing conspiracy theorist group that spread lies of ballot stuffing in the 2020 election is focused on perpetuating a new lie ahead of 2024: the myth of non-citizens voting in elections.
The group, which last year admitted before a Fulton County Judge that they had no evidence of any kind to support their baseless ballot stuffing claims that were used in the widely-debunked Dinesh D’souza film “2000 mules,” released a 44-page “advocate handbook.” In it, the group warns against the supposed threat of non-citizens casting ballots in the 2024 election and trains followers on how to combat the issue, which rarely happens in U.S. elections.
But, the handbook — and the larger initiative, which the group calls “The 611 Project,” named after federal law 18 USC 611, which expressly outlaws non-citizen voting in federal elections and outlines criminal penalties for those who do so — is riddled with errors, deliberate omissions of facts, and most glaringly and unsurprisingly, zero evidence to suggest claims that there was or will be non-citizens voting en masse in the upcoming election. True the Vote did not respond to TPM’s requests for comment.
This new “handbook” from the MAGA group is just one layer of election deniers’ and conspiracy theorists’ revived fixation on non-citizen voting heading into the 2024 election, as Donald Trump and his supporters set themselves up to challenge the election if Trump loses. Last month, House Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Donald Trump promoted a new “election integrity” effort by holding a big press briefing at Mar-a-Lago to announce legislation that would stop non citizens from voting — which is already illegal under federal law.
David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, told TPM that True the Vote’s recent efforts are merely a way to cast doubt on the integrity of another election.
“It’s an attempt to create a false narrative about the security and integrity of an election again, that they think they’re going to lose,” he said.
It’s also a provably false narrative. Non-citizens have been prevented from voting in federal elections for a long time, and those laws have been augmented by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, passed in response to the 2000 election, which requires all new registrants to provide identification at the polls.
“Our voter lists are more accurate, more secure, more reflective of the eligible voting population than they have ever been in American history,” Becker said.
True the Vote is enlisting private citizens to help it overwhelm under-staffed and under-resourced election offices with voter roll challenges ahead of election day.
“An IV3 user out of Pennsylvania is sorting through 17k ineligible records identified in her County! Great work!,” the right-wing election denying group True the Vote posted on Twitter Sunday. The tweet, which has since been deleted, then calls for voters to register to use IV3 so that they too can “get to work on the voter rolls” in their respective counties.
The post is the perfect encapsulation of a concerning effort by MAGA groups like True the Vote to recruit private citizens to sift through thousands of voter registrations to identify what they believe are ineligible voters in the voter rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election in the fall. The effort to patrol voters with tools like IV3 — a technology that purports to identify ineligible voters — is also evidence of the way that voter roll maintenance is — as Alice Clapman, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, describes it — “getting swept up in the broader election denial of doubting election outcomes based on a variety of myths about how elections are run.”
“Everyone agrees that states and localities should do their best to maintain accurate voter rolls,” Clapman said, “but we have a set of professional administrators who have a set of professional practices they use to make sure that that is done responsibly.”
So a few losers with time on their hands can baselessly challenge thousands of voter registrations, with the people being challenged not necessarily even knowing about it in a timely fashion. We have a lot of work to do to actually and genuinely protect the integrity of this election. There’s a lot more at both stories, so check them out.
A quick look at the relevant Texas Election Code text suggests that anyone challenging had best have a lot of time on their hands. On the other hand, a flood of such challenges would be difficult to administer. Scroll to Subchapter D for details.
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/EL/htm/EL.16.htm