Mike Johnson: Integrity Patriot
It’s election year again, so voter fraud fraudsters are again flinging smoke bombs into newsrooms and shouting, “Fire!” By the time the smoke clears and no fire is found, they’ve gotten their headlines and reinforced the notion among viewers that all-but-nonexistent voter fraud is a huge problem.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R), flanked by other Republican election integrity patriots outside the Capitol Wednesday, announced a bill to make voting by noncitizens illegaler than it is already. In apparent exchange for Donald Trump’s blessing, the Louisiana congressman committed to addressing the non-problem in a manner, writes Philip Bump, that “blends two of Trump’s favorite strawmen: illegal voters and immigrants.” He offered several “incorrect or misleading” reasons for the proposed legislation.
First, he said, there is “no current mechanism to ensure only those registering or voting are actually citizens.” This isn’t true; as PolitiFact outlined when Trump elevated this concern in 2020, numerous states have processes that validate whether voters are citizens.
Second, Johnson claimed that “I believe the number is close to probably, at this point, 16 million” immigrants who entered the country illegally since President Biden took office. This is wildly inflated. There have been about 7.7 million encounters at the border, according to Homeland Security data, but that includes millions of immigrants who were quickly deported. In January, The Washington Post reported that 2.3 million immigrants had been released into the United States. This excludes immigrants who evaded detection, but there are fewer such immigrants than before the expansion of border barriers.
Johnson has no evidence to prop up his strawman. But among voter fraud promoters, absence of evidence is never evidence of absence. That voting by noncitizens is a problem is not a matter of fact, but a matter of intuition — Truthiness. It’s something Johnson knows not with his head but with his gut.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number,” Johnson said.
“Here’s an intuition for you,” tweeted Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles. “People terrified of contact with government because they don’t want their lives destroyed by deportation don’t register to vote illegally and then vote illegally for the reward of having a tiny tiny influence on federal electoral outcomes.”
Bump offers more, but his colleague Aaron Blake followed up with this observation on Johnson’s “We don’t have that number” comment:
It’s at least somewhat transparent. It also undercuts the leader of the Republican Party, former president Donald Trump, who has ridiculously pegged the number of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants in the 2016 election at 3 million to 5 million (just enough, as it happens, to explain away his 2.9 million-vote loss in the popular vote). After the 2020 election, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani also ridiculously pegged the number of such illegal votes in Arizona alone at between 40,000 and 250,000 — as many as 1 out of every 14 votes cast.
There is precisely no evidence that this is a problem on any significant scale. The idea that large numbers of people who are in this country illegally would take the risk of being detected to cast a single vote in a presidential election is nonsensical on its face.
Donald Trump is nothing if not nonsensical. He already believes he is invincible. The only way he can lose is for someone else (or lots of brown-skinned someones) to out-cheat him. Trump has likely heard the rumor (I won’t repeat) about noncitizen voter registration that the Associated Press felt obliged to debunk a month ago.
I’ve written before that the “Republican argument” here is quite different when it comes to addressing gun violence. There is no need for additional “gun laws criminals will simply ignore; we just need to enforce laws already on the books. Except when it comes to voting restrictions, we need new laws on top of those they complain the state is already not enforcing.”
We need new laws, Republicans argue, to restore people’s confidence in elections Republicans have spent decades undermining.
Remember what the GOP meta-narrative is here:
Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.
They don’t want everybody to vote. They do not believe in a representative democracy where they cannot predetermine the outcome.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) took the podium and said without apparent irony, in support of Johnson’s bill, “The most fundamental thing you can do to destroy the rule of law and to destroy our republic is to undermine faith in elections and undermine the integrity of our elections, and to destroy this republic by making it unclear as to who’s voting.”
It’s pretty clear by now that destroying the republic is a central plank of the MAGA platform defined by one word: Trump.
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