A comprehensive audit of Georgia's voter rolls found that only 20 voter registrations out of 8.2 million belonged to noncitizens.
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Without ever providing any proof, Donald Trump and his sycophants have long claimed that noncitizens are voting in great numbers. Congressional Republicans even proposed passing a law that would outlaw this practice… even though it is already a felony.
Well, after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office released the results of a comprehensive voter roll audit, who is laughing now???
We are.
That’s because that audit found that only 20 voter registrations out of 8.2 million belonged to noncitizens (which comes out to one every 420,000).
Come to think of it, that doesn’t seem like that much of a problem.
In fact, let’s assume those 20 all voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.
That would have still left Trump a wee bit short in the Peach State. You may recall that the then-president had called Brad Raffensperger (R) and begged him to “find 11,780 votes” that would allow him to win the state (and lose to Biden by less in the Electoral College).
Well, a deficit of 11,760 votes would have still made him a loser.
The bigger story is, of course, that this destroys a key talking point of the lunatic right. To experts, it never made sense that noncitizens would (intentionally) commit a felony and risk deportation for casting a single vote.
In the past, these registrations were more often human error than anything else.
Now, this report, which Raffensperger called the “most comprehensive citizenship check conducted in the history of Georgia, if not the most comprehensive check ever conducted in the United States of America,” proves that the number of any kind of noncitizen registration (whether fraudulent or inadvertent) is miniscule.
Other states, like Texas, are purging their voter rolls with a much broader brush.
In August, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) released a fact sheet saying that “over 6,500 noncitizens” were removed from the voter rolls.
However, the accompanying statement clarifies that these are “potential noncitizens,” and that fewer than one-third of them had a history of voting.
Even assuming that they actually were noncitizens, which is more than unlikely, that’s still only one in 10,000. However, the more detailed audit in Georgia shows that the Texas figure is probably way off.
Gabriel Sterling, the COO of the Secretary of State’s office said as much on Wednesday.
“One of the reasons the secretary ordered this noncitizenship audit is to prove to people that – while there are ways that some can potentially get on – it is [increasingly] rare,” he told reporters at a press conference. “There is no proof that there is this overwhelming number of noncitizens on the rolls.”
It should be noted that the audit also identified 156 registrations that merit further investigation, and the authorities are following up on those.
That’s as it should be.
What should not happen, however, is for Trump and congressional Republicans to make up lies that undermine Americans’ faith in elections and stoke xenophobia.
Sadly, it stands to reason that, even though this report should put the matter to rest, the former president and the rest of his right-wing machine will not stop doing just that.
