House Speaker Mike Johnson relied on some flimsy facts to back the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, to make it harder for noncitizens to vote in the U.S. elections, something that is of course, already illegal.
The bill, which would require a Real ID or U.S. passport for voting rather than the standard driver’s license, passed the Republican-led House Wednesday, but it was built on a false premise and backed by baseless claims.
To attract support for the bill, Johnson circulated a white paper that included some claims about voting by undocumented immigrants—that aren’t backed up by any evidence, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.
In one section, Johnson’s handout referred to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who had ordered 137 noncitizens to be removed from the state’s voter rolls. But LaRose has yet to provide any actual evidence of illegally cast ballots.
LaRose even acknowledged in a May press release that some of those people could’ve been included as “the result of an honest mistake.”
“These may be well-meaning people trying to pursue the American dream, and communication barriers sometimes result in a registration form being submitted in error,” LaRose said. “We need to help them get that cleared up before an accidental registration becomes an illegal vote that could result in a felony conviction or even deportation.”
Under federal law, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles is required to offer voter registration forms to state residents seeking any service. As a result, some forms are filled out by noncitizens, who even mark themselves as ineligible to vote, but the forms are still processed anyway. Another possible explanation is that those voters have been naturalized but have yet to visit the BMV to officially change their status.
If the evidence isn’t really adding up, there’s a good reason for that: Noncitizens don’t really vote in state or federal elections. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Noncitizen voting is a right-wing conspiracy, though, and in reality, the only ones concocting a scheme to fake votes in the last election were in Donald Trump’s camp.
The SAVE Act is ultimately doomed to fail, but that may be by design. It will never pass the Democratic-led Senate, and President Joe Biden has already promised to veto it. But its failure sets the stage for Republicans to run rampant with claims of widespread voter fraud in the upcoming election, even though the numbers don’t support it.
