It’s already illegal for noncitizen migrants to vote. Ignore ‘great replacement’ scares | Opinon
Here’s something you might not know: It is already illegal for noncitizen migrants to vote in federal elections. Break that law and you can go to prison.
It’s not just illegal. It almost never happens.
You, gentle reader, might not know these things because Kansas and Missouri Republicans this week fiercely, loudly backed a new national bill to … make it illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.
Which, fine? Maybe it doesn’t hurt to say illegal things are still illegal, even if it’s a bit redundant.
Most Democrats in the House disagreed. One hundred ninety eight of them voted against the act.
But those aforementioned area Republicans made the case for the bill — the Save American Voter Eligibility Act, also known as the SAVE Act — in such baldly misleading fashion that their constituents ought to feel embarrassed and even insulted.
They certainly should feel annoyed.
“This says everything you need to know about the Democrat Party,” said Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, pointing to the opposition vote. “There is no reason non-American citizens should be voting in our election.”
“Only U.S. citizens should vote in U.S. elections. Period,” added Kansas Rep. Tracey Mann.
“Not on my watch,” added Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, doing his usual imitation of a rootin’ tootin’ Clint Eastwood social media cowboy. “Not in Missouri.”
It would be easy to get the entirely false impression from these guys that A) undocumented migrants were flooding our presidential elections and B) Democrats wanted it that way.
Which echoes — not all that subtly — the racist “great replacement theory” espoused by the discredited likes of fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the Buffalo gunman who slaughtered 10 people at a neighborhood back in 2022. It’s the false assertion that liberals want to import new, minority voters to displace white Americans.
It’s not an idea with a proud heritage.
Again: It’s already illegal for undocumented migrants to vote in federal elections. And there’s close to zero evidence they ever do.
“Maybe there’s a good case for some or all of the bill’s provisions. But the debate needs to start from a factual basis,” Walter Olsen, a legal writer for the libertarian Cato Institute, pointed out on Wednesday. The best evidence, he said. “is that there’s no good reason to think illegal noncitizen voting has changed the outcome of any federal race in the past generation.”
Bottom line: “The evidence of mass fraud isn’t there,” Olson said.
Indeed, House Speaker Mike Johnson — who pushed the bill — can’t really say otherwise.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” he said in May. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable.”
Who needs proof when you have gut feelings?
Not Roger Marshall. Or Tracey Mann. Or Andrew Bailey.
If there’s no real evidence of a problem, though, why do they act like there is one?
There are two likely possibilities.
The first — frankly more charitable — option is that they’re simply too ignorant to know the truth. It happens.
The other, darker possibility is that they assume their constituents and social media followers — you, gentle reader — are too ignorant to know the truth. And maybe the whole thing is a campaign season stunt to make Democrats look bad.
In which case a “great replacement” of sorts might not be a bad idea. We can start by replacing these guys in office with folks who tell us the truth once in a while.
Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.
This story was originally published July 12, 2024 at 5:03 AM with the headline "It’s already illegal for noncitizen migrants to vote. Ignore ‘great replacement’ scares | Opinon."