How voter purge disputes have fueled the GOP ‘narrative’ of noncitizen voting

(CNN) — The letter that Jona Hilario, a mother of two in Columbus, received this summer from the Ohio secretary of state’s office came as a surprise. It warned she could face a potential felony charge if she voted because, although she’s a registered voter, documents at the state’s motor vehicle department indicated she was not a US citizen.

But Hilario – who immigrated to the US from the Philippines two decades ago and now works to empower Asian and Pacific Islanders in her community – was naturalized in 2022; she just had not renewed her driver’s license since 2021. So, she had to submit proof of her citizenship to remain on the voter rolls ahead of the November election.

“You feel like a second-class citizen,” Hilario told CNN in an interview. “It makes me really just upset and angry. I became a citizen because I wanted to be able to have a voice in this process.”

The episode underscores the perils of a wide-ranging campaign by Republican officials and conservative groups to highlight voting by noncitizens – a problem that voting experts say is virtually nonexistent. The debate is raging from Ohio to Texas, and the US Supreme Court could rule as soon as Tuesday on a legal battle in Virginia over an eleventh-hour effort by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin to remove nearly 1,600 suspected noncitizens from the rolls ahead of next week’s election.

This issue is certain to transcend this year’s presidential contest. Next week, voters in eight states – including the presidential battlegrounds of Wisconsin and North Carolina – will decide whether to add language reaffirming citizen-only voting to their state constitutions. Twelve states have citizen-only voting laws on their books, according to Americans for Citizen Voting, which is pushing the constitutional amendments.

Republican officials around the country claim they have uncovered thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls and are filing new lawsuits alleging the Biden administration is withholding key information that allows them to verify that only US citizens are casting ballots.

But those claims have not always stood up to scrutiny, and eligible voters – including naturalized citizens such as Hilario – have often been found among those identified by Republicans as suspected noncitizens. Two thousand people had their registrations reactivated by Alabama officials from an initial August purge list of 3,200 suspected noncitizens after further investigation confirmed their citizenship – and that was before a court order reversing the purge program.

Voting rights activists who sued over Virginia’s purge program said that within a day of getting their hands on the list of removed voters, they were able to confirm that 18 of them were in fact citizens.

Courts in those cases, which were brought by the Biden administration and outside groups, blocked those programs because of a federal law that prohibits “systematic” purges too close to an election.

That hasn’t stopped former President Donald Trump and his allies from accusing a “weaponized” Justice Department of trying to let noncitizens vote.

Cases of noncitizens actually voting – which is a crime for federal elections – are extremely rare. A recent Georgia audit of the 8.2 million voters on its rolls found just 20 noncitizens who were registered to vote in the state – and that only nine of them had actually cast ballots.

“None of the issues that any of these states are raising are new because they are not actually trying to do anything to improve the accuracy of their voting rolls,” said Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, which has represented voters in the Alabama and Virginia cases.

Rather, Diaz argued, the recent flurry of activity in Republican-led states is “about setting up a scapegoat to point at if their candidates lose, and it’s about drumming up fear among the American people about whether or not our elections are secure.”

Ohio controversies

In Ohio – home to a hotly contested US Senate race – uproar has erupted over efforts by the state’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, to identify potential noncitizens on the voter rolls.

Naturalized citizens often get caught up in purges relying on state records or federal government databases because those can be outdated and not reflect a person’s current citizenship status.

LaRose, however, blames the federal government for not giving state officials access to data that he says he needs to definitively determine whether noncitizens are on the rolls. He recently sued the Biden administration over what he characterizes is a lack of assistance in vetting voters. Florida and Texas have filed similar lawsuits.

LaRose told CNN his office has identified more than 700 noncitizens on the rolls out of 8 million registered voters in the state and has directed local boards to remove them and, in some cases, referred them to the state attorney general for prosecution.

LaRose also has forged ahead with another controversial move: requiring suspected noncitizens to provide proof of citizenship at the polls before they are allowed to cast regular ballots – despite a 2006 federal court ruling that deemed that requirement unconstitutional.

Early voting already has begun in the state, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and other groups have gone to court, seeking to block LaRose’s new requirement.

Asked about the conflict with the 2006 ruling, LaRose said a citizen-only voting amendment to the state constitution approved by Ohioans in 2022 compels him to act. “I have the duty to make sure only citizens register to vote,” he said.

Noting that laws enacted since 2006 also mandate photo ID to vote, he said that requiring the presentation of naturalization papers will resolve a quandary for poll workers who are presented with drivers’ licenses from voters that state they were noncitizens at some point.

Kayla Griffin Green, the Ohio state director of the voting rights group All Voting is Local, said her organization has been trying to gain access to the lists of voters flagged as potential noncitizens by the Ohio secretary of state and has alerted the US Justice Department to its concerns about LaRose’s recent moves. She said federal officials have begun making inquiries.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment Monday.

Griffin Green said she fears “this narrative that we have noncitizens on the rolls is allowing people to start calling into question whether the vote is accurate before we even get to Election Day.”

Scrutiny of purge claims

When courts or outside groups have examined claims that Republicans have found thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls, those sweeping numbers have not always held up.

An investigation by ProPublica, the Texas Tribune and Votebeat into Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s claim that 6,500 noncitizens had been removed from the state’s rolls found that number to be likely inflated. The Texas secretary of state’s office had given the governor a much smaller number of people – 581 – who had been identified as likely noncitizens, according to the report, and the thousands others who were cited by Abbott were people who did not respond to letters questioning their citizenship. The outlets were able to confirm the citizenship of at least nine of those removed, having attempted to contact 70 of them.

In Alabama, the pre-election purge program was relying in part on state Department of Labor forms where a person checked a box indicating his or her citizenship status. Additional inquiry found that 93.8% of those whose form indicated noncitizenship had documents in government files confirming their citizenship, illustrating that confusing form design can cause people to make paperwork mistakes.

Six hundred of the 1,600 people Virginia had tagged for removal under its now-blocked purge program were flagged for checking the noncitizenship box on a DMV form there.

In both cases, federal judges ordered the reinstatement of anyone removed during the so-called quiet period laid out in the National Voter Registration Act, or the NRVA, which requires that states complete “systematic” list maintenance programs 90 days before a federal election.

Youngkin, the Virginia governor, rolled out an executive order demanding more aggressive actions to cull noncitizens from the rolls – resulting in the 1,600 removals – exactly 90 days before the election. US District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, when she reversed the program, said it was “not happenstance that this executive order intensifying these efforts was announced exactly on the 90th day.”

The state, which is asking the Supreme Court to intervene, says the program is not the “systematic” kind of purge covered by the NVRA, while arguing the NVRA’s quiet period does not apply to removals of noncitizens.

Trump and others have seized on the dispute to express outrage at the “weaponized” Justice Department and the “radical” judge.

“Trump: THE OCTOBER SUPRISE… THOUSANDS of illegals are back on the voter rolls!” a mass fundraising text message sent Saturday from the former president’s campaign said.

A Fox News chyron falsely described the decision as “Judge rules that suspected noncitizens can vote,” when in fact, under her order, letters will be sent to those affected by the last-minute purge program reminding them that noncitizens can’t vote, even if their registrations were being restored.

Also unmentioned was that a Trump-appointed judge in Alabama halted its pre-election purge program on same grounds. Alabama has not appealed that ruling.

Disputes over government databases

When not fending lawsuits challenging purge protocols, GOP-led states and conservative groups have filed lawsuits alleging that election officials are not being given access to government databases that would help them verify the citizenship of those on the rolls.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said, when announcing his recent lawsuit against the Biden administration, that the state needed the data to confirm the citizenship of nearly half a million voters who lack citizenship records in the state’s databases.

The federal government offers a database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, to help states vet registered voters. But not every state has entered into agreements with the Department of Homeland Security to use that system. And using it requires specific identification numbers – such as a Social Security number or what is known as an alien ID number – that are not available for every suspected noncitizen on the voter rolls.

In letters to state officials, DHS leaders have declined to use another citizenship database that does not require those ID numbers for the purpose of verifying voters, arguing that it’s both too cumbersome and not accurate enough to be used for voter purges.

“Those bureaucracies don’t always speak the same language,” Jason Snead, the executive director of Honest Elections Project, a conservative group focused on voter policies, told CNN. However, he pointed to bureaucratic pitfalls of using government databases to verify citizenship as a reason states should require documents proving citizenship to register to vote.

Doing so would likely require cover an act of Congress, as under Supreme Court precedent, voters without documentary proof of citizenship must be allowed to cast ballots in federal elections as long as the generic federal form used for voter registration does not include the requirement.

The recent spate of lawsuits seeking access to the federal data will take several months or even years to resolve.

The timing of the lawsuits – coupled with the attempts at last-minute purges – have some suspicious that the Republican moves are aimed at provoking headlines and press releases that propel their campaign messaging.

“Everyone knows that the National Voter Registration Act says you don’t do list maintenance in the last 90 days because the risk is too great, you’re going to screw up,” said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Marymount law professor who noted that such programs inevitably sweep up eligible citizens.

“The fact that states were asking to do this, knowing that they couldn’t, shows that they’re not serious about cleaning up the rolls,” said Levitt, who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “It’s about producing a press release.”

LaRose said the last-minute nature of his lawsuit is the result of the federal government recently denying his data request. He said he still will need access to the federal databases for future elections.

LaRose acknowledged that noncitizen voting and other forms of voter fraud are “relatively rare” but said he has a responsibility to act.

“It’s my duty as the chief elections officer of the state to identify things that could cause problems with our election, things that are causing voters concern and that we address those proactively,” he said.

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