The Big Lie, 2024 Style
He's already laying the groundwork to question a Biden victory in November.
In 2020, Trump launched his Big Lie about a stolen U.S. election. Through a conspiracy among Democrats, foreign countries, and nefarious, shadowy bad actors including innocent voting machine and voting software companies, so the theory went, Joe Biden had managed to switch millions of votes and win his election illegally, making him an illegitimate president. It was such an audacious, almost laughable lie that historians and political scientists dubbed it Trump’s “Big Lie”—one so outrageous and so stunning in its implications that it somehow has to be true, at least in the minds of his followers.
Now, in 2024, Trump is back at it again. On top of his original Big Lie, Trump is now pushing a 2024 version for the upcoming election: that illegal immigrants will be voting in numbers by the millions, rendering any result other than a Trump victory yet another fraud upon the American people.
Undocumented migrants aren’t allowed to vote in this country, and there are already laws on the books covering that. And there have been very few documented cases of non-citizens voting, certainly not enough to change the outcome of a national election. Nevertheless, recently House Speaker Mike Johnson made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to stand beside Donald Trump and proclaim that they were united in their resolve to pass a new law to prevent non-citizens from voting, never mind that there’s already such a law on the books and that such fraud rarely ever happens.
Their actions are of course performative, meant to plant dangerous seeds that could grow into even more dangerous lies. In today’s piece, I’ll explore this newest attack and how Trump is hoping to spin it into The Big Lie 2024 style.
Existing law already outlaws non-citizen voting
Last week, when Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to Mar-a-Lago to seek Trump’s support, it felt eerily familiar. It’s become a rite of passage for GOP House Speakers to make the journey to bend the knee to Trump. We all remember the photo of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy standing supportively by Trump just months after the deadly attack on the Capitol that Trump helped incite.
Like McCarthy, Johnson’s speakership hangs by a thread these days, with the far right ready to decapitate yet another GOP leader for having failed to toe the line, this time for Russia by denying critical aid to Ukraine. Trump’s support of Johnson came with a price, of course, because Trump is always transactional in his dealings. In this case, it was a pledge by Johnson to support a bill to clamp down on the alleged crisis in non-citizen voting.
It’s important to acknowledge that such a law already exists. It’s found at 18 U.S. Code Section 611, entitled “Voting by Aliens” in case it was unclear. It states quite plainly,
It shall be unlawful for any alien 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….
The law imposes a fine or up to one year in prison if violated, and it constitutes a deportable offense.
For good measure, it’s also a crime for non-citizens to vote under every state law in the union. These laws didn’t stop Speaker Johnson from promising to introduce a new bill to ban non-citizens (again) from voting. You can watch and hear his declaration, which no doubt pleased Donald Trump greatly, here.
Fox News apparently missed the irony of posting the existing law banning aliens from voting right next to Johnson as he promised to introduce the very same prohibition.
The non-existent history of non-citizen voting
If Trump is so worked up about this, despite the laws already clearly on the books, then there must be rampant violations occurring. “Illegals” must be voting in huge numbers, no?
Well, no.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Cato Institute on the other side of the political spectrum, non-citizen voting just isn’t a thing.
Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare. That includes the Brennan Center’s own study of 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election. We found that election officials in those places, who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes, referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, even suspected — not proven — noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast. But you don’t have to take our word for it: the Cato Institute will also tell you, “Noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.”
If you stop for just a moment to think about it, this makes perfect sense. Why would a non-citizen risk everything from prison to deportation to cast a ballot illegally, while also creating a traceable government record of the crime? And why would someone do all this just to add a single vote that won’t make any real difference to the outcome of an election? It defies common sense.
But common sense and actual data aren’t what Trump and his purveyors of the Big Lie 2024 style are about.
What the right claims about “illegal” immigrant voting
The idea that millions of undocumented migrants will cast ballots in 2024 and help steal the election for Biden is objectively far-fetched. But it taps into far deeper fears of brown- and black-skinned people taking over America in something broadly known as the Great Replacement Theory.
The Great Replacement Theory is a racist ideology that falsely warns that migrants who don’t speak our language and don’t share our values are deliberately being let into the U.S. so that Jews and other Democrats can turn them into millions of future voters. This process will allegedly displace “white” Americans politically and economically. Right-wing amplifiers of this include Tucker Carlson (formerly of Fox News) and Elon Musk, owner of the X platform.
This is by no means a recent theory. Waves of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe sparked the same unfounded fears and conspiracies in the 19th and 20th centuries with respect to the “replacement” of more established “Northern European” Americans.
But recent conspiracies around migrants have shortened the timeline of the Great Replacement and are warning that the hordes of desperate asylum seekers crossing into America now will be deployed this November to unlawfully tip the election to Biden.
One primary vector of the Big Lie 2024 style is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She recently stated on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that Democrats are going to “steal the election” by having “illegals voting in our election.” Greene is helping pave the way for more false claims by Trump and his backers of yet another stolen election.
You can watch and listen to her outrageous statement here:
Not to be outdone, former Trump advisor Stephen Miller blasted the existing law on the books, claiming falsely that the administration knows it’s “all done on the honor system: check a box, get to vote. That's it.” He added, “Biden is DESPERATE for his legion of imported illegals to vote in ‘24.”
The disinformation is sometimes even so bad that even Fox News has to fact check it. One rumor, reported breathlessly by the account “Oversight Project” on the X platform, garnered over 9.2 million views, and it remains up on the site. It falsely stated,
BREAKING - Flyers distributed at NGO in Mexico encouraging illegals to vote for President Biden
The flyers reads: [sic]
“Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open”
The thread goes on to cite the conspiracy peddling “Muckraker” account before making false and antisemitic claims around the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and George Soros.
But as Fox59 reported, the Resource Center Matamoros denies that these were ever its flyers at all. Indeed, the whole thing bears the whiff of planted evidence and reads like a clumsy psy op:
Accusations that Resource Center Matamoros was encouraging noncitizens to vote gained momentum after online posts displayed Spanish-language flyers instructing migrants to vote illegally for Biden once they arrived in the U.S. The flyers contained the logo of the organization, but it was not clear who created or posted them.
Videos showed them on the interior walls of portable toilets at the center’s shelter near Mexico’s border with Texas.
Resource Center Matamoros founder Gaby Zavala told The Associated Press the organization doesn’t know who made the flyers and said her group “does not encourage immigrants to register to vote or cast ballots in the U.S.”
The provenance of the flyers was still unknown Wednesday. They contained errors in spelling and grammar, and appeared to include verbatim paragraphs from the organization’s English-language website that were translated into Spanish using online translation software.
Despite the dubious origin of the rumor and the clear denials by the organization, several high profile right-wing organizations, including The Daily Signal, The Heritage Foundation, and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk spread and amplified the highly suspect claim. Kirk even called upon Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to investigate the flyers.
It’s crucial to call this out and push back
When Trump began attacking mail-in voting in 2020, claiming falsely and without evidence that mailed ballots were vulnerable, easily tampered with, and unreliable, it should have clued us in that he would reject the results of the 2020 election if they were unfavorable to him.
We also should have known that Trump would exploit the “red mirage” created when Election Day ballots, which would favor the GOP, were counted before the mailed ballots, which would favor the Democrats. Trump would go on to demand that the vote counting stop while he was still ahead, even though millions of mailed ballots remained to be counted.
We now already know that a main attack by Trump and the MAGA GOP will be upon the ballot counts, particularly in battleground states with high numbers of migrants whom he will claim voted illegally by the millions. This necessitates preemptive action.
The American public must be warned in advance by the media this time, with Trump’s false claims debunked long before Trump makes them on or right after Election Night. Secretaries of State, particularly in the battleground states, must be dialed in on this threat and must go on record now and put the word out to their constituents about the false flag of non-citizen voting.
The far right has only just begun to test market its messaging and even apparently plant fake evidence to help spread election disinformation about non-citizen voting. We must now meet their lies head on before they spread any further.
I am a legal immigrant ( green card holder and tax payer ) and cannot vote or claim Social Security , so how can they say that illegal immigrants con do these things is beyond me
What was once "yellow journalism" has morphed into something much darker. Perhaps we should call it "orange journalism?"