Wait. That’s not the way you’re supposed to look at it. (Photo: Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and national and state Republican organizations have sued Nevada, alleging noncitizens could be voting in the state.
The suit does not document or even allege a single specific instance of a noncitizen voting in Nevada.
That makes sense, since the suit actually has nothing to do with noncitizens allegedly voting.
The noncitizen nonproblem
Trump and the Republican groups allege 3,947 people who once were listed as noncitizens by the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles when they got their driver’s license also appear to have cast a ballot in the 2020 general election.
As the kids used to say, whoa if true.
The Nevada Democratic Party’s response to this alarming revelation provided by Trump & Friends: Um, those people got naturalized and are now U.S. citizens.
“DMV records will reflect, at most, the citizenship status of a voter when they last applied for a driver’s license or identification card,” reads the motion to dismiss filed on behalf of the Nevada State Democratic Party and the National Democratic Committee. “But that may have been years ago, and the voter may have since become a naturalized citizen, as more than 10,000 Nevadans did in 2022 alone.”
And guess what’s one of the first things a new citizen does? Yup. Register to vote, notes the Democrats’ motion, adding that the ostensible goal of Trump’s suit is to purge those newly naturalized citizens from voter rolls.
The suit filed in Nevada is similar to ones filed by Trump and/or allied organizations in other states, including fellow presidential battlegrounds Arizona and North Carolina.
And, to reiterate, Trump’s Nevada suit fails to document a single instance of a noncitizen actually voting.
That’s not to say it doesn’t happen in the U.S. Noncitizen voting isn’t nonexistent.
It’s pretty close to it, though.
One of the more ambitious studies of the subject, conducted by the Brennan Center after the 2016 election, focused on 42 jurisdictions across the nation, including Clark County, Nevada. It found that of 23.5 million votes cast in those jurisdictions, there were only 30 incidents of noncitizens suspected of voting, including three in Nevada.
Those three suspected instances of noncitizens voting had first been announced in 2017 by then-Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske. As then-state senator and now Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford noted at the time, there was no concrete evidence supporting the suspicion.
And there never would be. Apart from Adam Laxalt bringing them up while filing one of the weak – and quickly tossed out of court – suits to help Trump overthrow the 2020 election results in Nevada, the hullabaloo over those three purported noncitizen voters quietly dissolved into a cloud of “never mind.” (The case the Trump campaign filed against Nevada this year is something of a copy of Laxalt’s suit that was quickly dismissed in 2020, by the way.)
Meanwhile, an analysis from the Heritage Foundation – the same people who brought you Project 2025, a document no one has described as immigrant-friendly – found that between 2002 and 2023, there were only two dozen documented instances of noncitizens voting in the entire U.S.
So maybe one case per year. In the entire country.
Thankfully, like noncitizen voting, voter fraud of all sorts is very, very rare.
Here in Nevada, only a couple instances of genuinely documented voter or election illegality of any kind have made headlines in recent years.
One was the faithful Trump devotee who sought and got media attention after the 2020 election by crying that someone had stolen his deceased wife’s mail ballot and used it to vote. Alas, it turned out – sad trombone – that he himself was the fraudulent voter illegally pretending to be his deceased wife.
The other, and far more significant, recent instance of election-related illeglity in Nevada involved Trump having his minions tell the chair of the Nevada State Republican Party and five other area Trump worshipers to file phony electoral college certificates in the hope of overturning the 2020 election results. Which those six Nevadans willingly did.
In other words, all existing evidence, facts, and research on the frequency of noncitizen voting indicates that in the 2020 election, Nevada’s six fake electors far outnumbered Nevada noncitizen voters.
Two disgusting things that go disgustingly together
In states with more electoral college votes than Nevada and who also had fake electors after the 2020 election, the fake electors would outnumber any noncitizen voters (assuming any exist in those states) by even larger margins.
And yet despite their vastly greater numbers, the fake electors, like the nation’s noncitizen voters, had no numerical impact on the outcome of the 2020 election. (The fake electors can however make one claim that noncitizen voters can’t: They were indispensable to a violent attempt to nullify the votes of a majority of Nevada voters and overturn an election.)
Trump’s Nevada suit about noncitizens voting isn’t about noncitizens voting.
It’s yet another example of the same thing Trump has been doing for years – deliberately and preemptively casting doubt on the election in case he loses. Again.
Among Trump’s many despicable tactics, he must be especially delighted with and proud of the noncitizen voting angle, marrying as it does two disgusting things that go disgustingly together: Trump’s passion for destroying democracy, and his racist rhetorical garbage about immigrants and how criminal behavior is “in their genes.”
Trump and his allies didn’t file a suit alleging noncitizens are voting in Nevada because they want to prove it or win it (as if). They filed the suit to undermine faith in the election and keep Trump’s supporters riled up and cheering his countless filthy lies.