Congress is heading toward a potential government shutdown, less than two months before the election, over a made-up issue.
Donald Trump and the GOP falsely assert that non-citizens voting could influence the 2024 election when study after study shows that this is not a real thing. In exchange for a spending bill that would keep the government open, some Republicans are demanding legislation to combat this nonexistent problem, and that would only serve to disenfranchise Americans.
Trump, who continues to falsely assert that he won the 2020 election, has publicly urged the GOP to move ahead with a shutdown if Democrats don’t comply with their demands. “If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday.
At the crux of the impasse is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require voters to present proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, in order to be able to vote. It has been illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections since 1996, so the SAVE Act would just create additional barriers to voting for American citizens. It could disenfranchise millions of voters, such as people in indigenous communities who use tribal IDs, as well as Americans who do not have the documents that they would need readily available.
“If you make [registering] harder, there will be students, young people, elderly people, poor people and other groupings of people who would just not bother,” Gilda Daniels, an election law professor at the University of Baltimore, told NPR.
The idea that non-citizens are changing elections, a circumstance that the progressive Brennan Center has called “vanishingly rare,” has been repeatedly debunked by both liberal and conservative groups. Non-citizens face the deterrents of prison time and deportation if they were to vote.
“The claim that illegal voting is swaying American elections is nothing if not sensational,” Walter Olson, a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote earlier this year. “Those who levy sensational charges should bear the burden of proving them. But they haven’t.” Olson added: “Bogus claims of widespread voter fraud, even when they do not stoke hatred and fear of the foreign-born, are grossly irresponsible.”
A database from the conservative Heritage Foundation — yes, the same Heritage Foundation behind Project 2025 — documents only 85 allegations of non-citizens voting over two decades — a negligible number. Speaking of negligible numbers, the Brennan Center found that 0.0001 percent of the votes in the 2016 election were by non-voters. There’s also the 2022 probe in Georgia that found that 1,634 non-citizens had attempted to register to vote — but none of them did so successfully, so none of them voted — and the study in Arizona that found that 0.04 percent of Arizona voters were not citizens when they registered or after registering to vote in the 2020 election. “The evidence very clearly doesn’t document or demonstrate anything close to the claim that the Arizona Presidential election was decided by noncitizens in 2020,” Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University told The Washington Post.
According to NPR, the myth that non-citizens are voting in elections has been around for over a century, starting after a wave of immigration following the Civil War. “I think that’s what it’s meant to do — to freak people out over an issue. It’s a continuation of this myth of voter fraud,” Daniels said. “It not only creates hysteria, but it [furthers] this idea that only certain people should be allowed to participate in the process.”
Johnson postponed a vote on the spending bill on Wednesday. Congress needs to pass legislation by Oct. 1 in order to avoid a shutdown. “No vote today because we’re in the consensus building business here in Congress. With small majorities, that’s what you do,” Johnson said.
Trump, meanwhile, is so desperate to create the impression of fraud that he is willing to shut down the government over it.
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