Please Focus on the Election Fraud That Actually Exists

I agree with you that noncitizens should not be permitted to vote in federal elections. It is already illegal, and there are significant penalties for doing so. What I do not agree with is the repeated suggestion that noncitizen voting represents a significant threat to our elections when the evidence simply does not support that claim. Noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare. A Brennan Center review of election officials in 42 jurisdictions covering 23.5 million votes in the 2016 election found only about 30 suspected cases of noncitizen voting—just 0.0001% of the votes examined. A separate Reuters review found that even the Heritage Foundation's own election-fraud database documented only 24 noncitizen votes over a period of roughly 20 years. So if your concern is protecting the integrity of elections, I would ask that you apply the same standard to all illegal voting—not just cases involving immigrants. There are documented cases of Republicans illegally voting in recent elections. In fact, FactCheck.org examined the six people convicted of voting or attempting to vote in the name of deceased voters in the 2020 election and found that five were registered Republicans. Those included Republicans who voted using their deceased relatives' ballots and a Republican who voted twice. The Heritage Foundation itself has documented additional examples. It reported that registered Republican Jay Ketcik voted twice in the 2020 election, once in Florida and again by absentee ballot in Michigan. Another registered Republican, Tracey McKee, voted using her deceased mother's ballot. And here in Iowa, Kim Phuong Taylor—a Republican candidate's wife—was convicted in 2023 of 26 counts of providing false information in registering and voting, three counts of fraudulent registration, and 23 counts of fraudulent voting stemming from the 2020 elections. She was sentenced in 2024 to eight months of imprisonment, followed by supervised release and a fine. There are more recent examples as well. Brian Pritchard, a former Georgia Republican Party official, was found to have voted illegally nine times while he was on felony probation. He was subsequently removed from his Republican Party leadership position. The point is not that Republicans as a group are committing election fraud. They aren't, and it would be just as unfair to make that sweeping accusation as it would be to portray immigrants as a group as election fraudsters. The point is that illegal voting is an individual crime, not a partisan or immigration issue. If you genuinely want the federal government to work with the states to protect our elections, then let's focus on evidence rather than hypothetical threats. Investigate and prosecute anyone who illegally votes—Republican, Democrat, independent, citizen or noncitizen. But please don't use the extraordinarily rare phenomenon of noncitizen voting to justify policies that make it harder for millions of eligible American citizens to vote. Election security should be based on actual evidence and applied equally to everyone. That is how we protect both the integrity of our elections and the right of Americans to vote.