By
Robert Reich
On
Febuary 12, White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller claimed 14 percent of non-citizens are registered
to vote. “We know for a fact, you have massive numbers of non-citizens registered to vote in this country,” he said, appearing on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “The White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud.”
Miller
is repeating an assertion Trump continues to make.
It
is absolutely false.
What
do we do when we have a president and White House surrogates, along with
enablers in the right-wing media, who continuously lie about something as
fundamental to our democracy as whether we’ve got massive voter fraud?
The
answer is we find the truth. We spread the truth. We continue to speak the
truth. And we use every chance we have – in opeds, in letters to editors, in
local media, on national media – to state the truth.
And
we demand that big lies like this be corrected.
A new report on voter fraud from the Brennan Center confirms that multiple nationwide studies have uncovered only a handful of incidents of non-citizens voting.
Based on state prosecution records, votes by
non-citizens account for between 0.0003 percent and 0.001 percent of all votes
cast.
Election officials agree that non-citizen voting
in our elections is not a problem.
The National Association of Secretaries of
State, whose Republican-majority membership includes the chief elections
officers of 40 states, said they “are not aware of any evidence that
supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump.”
Federal law and the laws of every state bar non-citizens from
registering to vote or voting in elections. Experts believe that the severity of the penalties for
violating these laws serve as a significant deterrent. Also, it is
relatively easy for a non-citizen to get caught.
Trump’s
false assertion of massive voting fraud is intended for one purpose: to
legitimate more voter identification laws around the country.
Voter
identification laws are already spreading rapidly. Before 2006, no state
required photo identification to vote on Election Day.
Now, 10 states have this
requirement. All told, a total of 33 states — representing more than half the
nation’s population — have some version of voter identification rules on the
books.
The
purpose of these laws is to further entrench Republican officials.
New research shows a significant drop in minority
participation when and where these laws are implemented – which is what you
would expect given that members of racial and ethnic minorities have less access to photo IDs.
The
research also shows that because minority voters tend to be
Democrats, strict voter ID laws tilt the primary electorate dramatically. The
turnout gap between Republicans and Democrats in primary contests more than
doubles from 4.3 points to 9.8 points.
The
truth: There’s no voter fraud. State ID laws intended to stop voter fraud are
really intended to stop Democrats from voting – and that’s been their effect.
One
of the most important common goods in our society is the truth about our
democracy. Trump is pulverizing that truth – laying the groundwork for more
state restrictions on access to the ballot by American citizens.
This
is beyond shameful.
ROBERT
B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and
"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving
Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect
magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR
ALL.
