Originally Published: August 20, 2024 10:42 a.m.

State-level Republican officials have been making a big show of the work they are doing to boot alleged non-citizens from the voting rolls — an emphasis that echoes the efforts by presidential candidate Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to stoke pre-election panic about the false and dangerous narrative that non-citizens are voting en masse for Democrats.

Earlier this month, Alabama's Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) announced that his office had identified over 3,000 alleged non-citizens on the voter rolls. Virginia's Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) similarly stated in an executive order that officials had found over 6,000 suspected non-citizens on his state's voter rolls. These announcements gave rise, in turn, to news coverage about the thousands of non-citizen registered voters, perpetuating the narrative that non-citizen voting will be an issue in November and prompting praise from Trump himself. 

Ever since the former president and his allies began signaling that lies about non-citizen voting will play a role in any election-denying schemes this presidential cycle, state lawmakers have been pushing the myth in various ways, including through redundant legislation outlawing non-citizen voting, which is already illegal in federal elections. More recently, red state officials have begun putting out public announcements and executive orders highlighting the work they are doing to remove thousands of supposed non-citizens from voter rolls, and bragging about that work to the press. 

But the messaging campaign is, at best, disingenuous, experts told TPM. These announcements are intentionally vague, and tend to leave out key details about these supposed registered non-citizen voters, they said, prompting fear about the integrity of state voter rolls and perpetuating a myth that there is simply no evidence to support.