Here & Now

On multiple fronts, the Trump administration is going hard against noncitizen voting ahead of the midterms.

There's the work with the U.S.

Postal Service to send out mail in ballots only to voters on state citizenship lists.

There's a purported U.S.

Census Bureau report claiming that 500 noncitizens voted in Wisconsin in the 2020 election, and a new Department of Homeland Security investigative surge in states including Wisconsin, to prosecute noncitizen voting.

And yet, Wisconsin election officials describe noncitizen voting as vanishingly rare because it's already illegal.

What's going on?

We turn to Marquette University professor of political Science Philip Rocco.

And thanks very much for being here.

Good to be with you.

So as to that question, what is going on?

Well, I think what we're seeing is a kind of multilayered effort by the Trump administration to kind of do January 6th every day to keep alive the myth that there's widespread noncitizen voting to kind of delegitimize elections.

And it's not just kind of one instrument or one tool that they're using to do this.

There's using information from the Census Bureau, using enforcement power from DHS, and using in a in a really irregular way.

The Postal Service, in an attempt to to gatekeep who votes.

And so I think what that tells us is that the administration is really hedging its bets, both on what strategies it thinks it's going to be successful with, but also what the outcome, in a way, of all of these strategies is going to be.

And they're kind of setting up, I think, some opportunities for themselves.

If one of the strategies doesn't work out, that they can sort of fall back on another.

Should ordinary voters be concerned about all of this?

Well, I think.

It's important to distinguish being concerned from being vigilant and aware of what the facts on the ground are, right?

State and local officials are the people who are responsible for administering elections in the United States.

The white House is explicitly not an entity that is allowed to do that.

The federal government is is allowed in in very limited instances, to play a role in election administration, but not the things that are happening now.

And so the information on on how elections are going to run, how they're going to work comes from state and local officials.

And in a way, that's the important.

Those are the important people to, to be listening to and to make a plan to vote is, is really important.

So I think to be aware, to be vigilant, but not to be sort of dismayed simply by looking at what's happening in Washington, but knowing that that that the authority at the state and local level.

So the Census Bureau report showed 24,000 noncitizens voted nationwide in 2020, and 500 in Wisconsin.

What was your reaction when you saw that Census Bureau report?

Well.

My reaction was that it didn't show that at all.

We, the Census Bureau's own research has time and time again done record matching studies of this kind and found false positives.

In other words, purported matches that weren't matches at all between two different lists of of individuals in excess of 6% of the sample.

And what we see here is a number of people who are alleged to be non-citizen voters.

That is far smaller than that.

And so really, you can't distinguish what the Census Bureau, if indeed the Census Bureau did this research, which is in doubt itself, found from no statistical evidence at all.

So there's also the process being developed by the Postal Service to send ballots and envelopes with barcodes showing recipients are on state citizenship lists.

I know Wisconsin officials say the new system is nowhere near ready, in ballots are already being sent out.

Will this disrupt the midterm elections?

Potentially including in Wisconsin?

Well, I think.

That if the courts are not successful in stopping this process from going forward, and I think we have some indications to think that it's going to be difficult for the Postal Service to to play this role, if not legally, then certainly operationally, it it is a really heavy operational lift that they are trying to pull off in a very short amount of time.

But I do worry about chaos and I worry about it not only because that that's what might play out, but also because how the the appearance or image of chaos can make it potentially easier for the Trump administration after the fact.

To say that this wasn't a legitimate election.

And it's very similar to somebody lighting a house on fire and then, you know, saying, oh, well, this is a this is a terrible situation when when they themselves have caused it.

There's the new investigation into states, including Wisconsin, on the part of the Department of Homeland Security, as we mentioned.

What do you know about that and what investigators will be looking at?

And what's your reaction to that?

Well, I think.

We don't know very much about that effort at this time.

It certainly seems to be an indication that the Trump administration, which has lost time and time again in federal court cases, trying to force states to produce information that is protected, information about individual voters, personal details, the Trump administration doesn't seem abandoning that effort, simply because courts have said that it's illegal.

They are now going to use seemingly every tool in their toolkit to try to intimidate state officials into giving them what they want.

It's kind of an extortionary activity, but we don't really know exactly what these officials are going to be looking for and what that looks like, but I think it's, you know, another part of this multi-layered strategy that we're seeing, which indicates to me that the administration doesn't seem interested in giving up.

All right.

We leave it there.

Philip Rocco thank you so much.

Thank you.

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