4/19/2024

Former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R) joined forces to stoke fear about Republicans' favorite election bogeyman: noncitizen voting.

Plus: a breakdown of a busy week for voting rights in the U.S. Supreme Court and a look at our latest exposé on the Public Interest Legal Foundation — a nefarious right-wing legal group using the court system to spread election disinformation.

Debunking the Myth of Noncitizen Voting… Again

In a televised press conference at Trump’s luxury Mar-a-Lago Florida resort late Friday afternoon, Johnson joined the former president to announce that congressional Republicans will be introducing an election bill targeting noncitizens that would require voters to show a proof of citizenship in order to cast a ballot in federal elections.

The short presser hit a number of Trump’s greatest hits — racist rantings about border security and election integrity — but it gave an embattled Johnson a chance in the spotlight as he discussed the new bill, which has yet to be introduced, and the threat of noncitizens voting in the upcoming election. Johnson rattled off some fearmongering comments about the upcoming election and said that “if only 1 out of 100 [noncitizens] voted” that could lead to hundreds of thousands of noncitizens voting, which “could turn an election.”

Here’s the thing: it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections — and has been for quite some time. Which means the entire presser amounted to nothing more than kayfabe — a wrestling term that basically describes how wrestlers pretend how things that are obviously fake are real.

Since 1996, it’s been illegal for any noncitizen to “vote in any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing a candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, Member of the House of Representatives, Delegate from the District of Columbia, or Resident Commissioner.” And yet, Republicans insist time and again that this is a real problem that’s happening en masse, despite numerous reports and analysis that prove otherwise.

The result is that it spreads election disinformation that then gets swallowed up by state and local officials in red jurisdictions which then try and pass laws to address the non-issue.

Case-in-point: Huntington Beach, California, which passed a ballot measure in March to implement a voter ID requirement for all municipal elections. A measure that violates state law and for which California’s attorney general and secretary of state filed a lawsuit this week to block.

If you want to learn more about the right-wing obsession on noncitizen voting, Sophie breaks it down on YouTube here.

It Was a Busy Week For Voting Rights in the U.S. Supreme Court

First, in a win for voters, the Supreme Court declined to take up a Republican legal challenge to Washington’s state-level Voting Rights Act (WVRA). The state enacted the WVRA, modeled after elements of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, in 2018. A GOP precinct commissioner sued to overturn the WVRA, claiming that the law, which led to better representation for the state’s Latino voters, violated state and federal law because it made race a “predominant factor” in redistricting. Now that the Supreme Court decided not to take up the case, the law’s robust protections for minority voters remain in place.

The Supreme Court also declined to hear a case challenging a Wyoming law that prohibits election campaigning, canvassing and collecting signatures within 300 feet of a polling place. A lawsuit filed in 2020 argued that the law was unconstitutional because it violates freedom of speech by limiting the ability to express political opinions. The law survived a challenge from a federal and appeals court, so now that the Supreme Court won’t take it up, it’ll remain in effect.

We’ve been closely following Kari Lake’s fringe lawsuit trying to get the Supreme Court to take up her case to ban voting machines in Arizona. We still don’t know if the Court will hear the case, but a number of state and county-level GOP parties filed amicus briefs this week urging the Court to hear Lake out. So far, the state Republican parties of Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Nebraska and New Mexico — along with a number of county GOP parties in Arizona, Georgia, Nebraska and Oregon — urged the Supreme Court to take up the case.

Exposing the Right-Wing Group Using the Courts To Spread Election Disinformation

Over the past few election cycles, there’s been a steady stream of right-wing groups launching a full-frontal legal assault on voting rights. But the Public Interest Legal Foundation — a conservative nonprofit legal organization led by a who’s who of election deniers and conspiracy theorists — is one of the most prolific. Since its founding in 2012, the group has become synonymous with suing state and local governments to purge registered voters from their election rolls, barring noncitizens from voting and defending voter suppression laws.

Our latest exposé dives deep into the origins of PILF — led by prominent right-wing figures like Cleta Mitchell, J. Christian Adams and John Eastman — and how the group litters its lawsuits with election disinformation in order to sow doubt in the election process, even if those lawsuits are usually dismissed.

According to our election litigation tracker, PILF is currently involved in six active cases that seek access to states’ voter registration records or bar noncitizens from voting. And there are at least eight recently closed cases that PILF has been involved in — as a plaintiff or in smaller roles like filing supporting briefs — according to our litigation tracker. The group is able to fund such a robust legal effort thanks to a stream of revenue from right-wing dark money groups like the Leonard Leo-tied 85 Fund, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and DonorsTrust.

Read the piece here.

EXPLAINER: Trump’s Presidential Immunity Argument

Next week the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in one of the biggest cases in the history of the Court where both sides will answer: Are former presidents immune from criminal prosecution for conduct while in office? Ahead of oral argument, Trump submitted his reply brief in the immunity case, reiterating his claim that presidents "enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts." Read our breakdown of his arguments here.  ➡️

What We’re Doing

Madeleine Greenberg — senior case coordinator at Democracy Docket — joined the NPR-affiliated Louisiana Considered podcast to discuss her article ringing the alarm bells about the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' troubling trend of rehearing its own voting and election cases at the expense of voters. Listen to it here.

A new episode of our podcast Defending Democracy dropped this morning! In today’s episode, Hillary Rodham Clinton, former U.S. secretary of state and 2016 presidential nominee, joins to talk with Marc about the harm Donald Trump has done to our democracy and America’s global standing. Plus, Secretary Clinton talks about her thoughts on the GOP’s plans for 2024, Supreme Court justices and President Joe Biden. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.