Dear Editor,
Coming up on the fourth anniversary of the 2020 election, we are amazed at the continued peddling of the Trump campaign election lies. The campaign and its allies consistently claim that if the former president loses in November, it will be because non-citizens are voting by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. This is blatantly false and damages the perception of our election system.
Trump allies have pressed for voter roll purges, filed lawsuits, prepared for on-the-ground monitoring of polling places, attempted to influence election boards, and spread misinformation online. Know that non-citizen voting in federal elections is already illegal.
The conservative Heritage Foundation (author of Project 2025) has campaigned fiercely against “voter fraud.” A close review of the cases in Heritage’s database shows that the organization has documented just 68 cases of non-citizen voting going back to the 1980s (40 years). Given that over one billion votes have been cast over that period in thousands of elections, the incidence of proven non-citizen voting is below 0.0001%.
Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger conducted a citizenship review of Georgia’s voter rolls. The review found that from 1997 to 2022 (25 years), 1,634 people who had attempted to register to vote could not be verified by the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. Due to these procedures, NO non-citizens identified in the citizenship check can vote.
We implore the citizens of our county and beyond not to submit to lies and paranoia. Elections will be hotly contested in our battleground state.
Let the poll workers and election boards do their job. Let voters vote without harassment. Let everyone who is campaigning have the respect of our freedom of expression. Be civil. Be kind. These people you see in your precincts are your neighbors.
R. Pandina, B. Hamilton, J.W. Collins – Greensboro