Brad Raffensperger, Election Official Who Defied Donald Trump, Echoes His Voter Fraud Fearmongering | EUROtoday

WASHINGTON — On Wednesday, the Republican election official who defied Donald Trump in 2021 echoed Trump’s fearmongering about noncitizen voting.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger joined different Republican officers in Washington to name for states to ban undocumented immigrants from casting ballots.

“I believe that no matter where you’re elected – for president, school board, county commissioner – that we should require only Americans vote in our elections,” Raffensperger mentioned Wednesday on the National Press Club.

“With the open border policy that we’ve had in place for so many years now, voters are concerned about noncitizen voting,” he mentioned.

Raffensperger spoke at an occasion hosted by Americans for Citizen Voting, a bunch that advocates for states to amend their constitutions to forestall noncitizens from voting in state and native elections. Such amendments can be on the poll in eight states this November.

Noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, and consultants say violations are uncommon. But a number of liberal cities, together with ones in Maryland, Vermont and California, in addition to Washington, D.C., permit noncitizens to vote in native elections.

Raffensperger’s D.C. press convention got here as Trump and different prime Republicans falsely warn that undocumented immigrants may sway November’s election in Democrats’ favor.

“Non citizen Illegal Migrants are getting the right to vote, being pushed by crooked Democrat Politicians who are not being stopped by an equally dishonest Justice Department,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in July. “That’s how they get an incapacitated moron like Joe Biden elected.”

Trump’s allies in Congress have mentioned they received’t help a authorities funding invoice this month except it contains measures to dam noncitizen voting, resembling by requiring states to acquire proof of citizenship earlier than registering voters. Trump backed the gambit final week, saying he would “shut down the government in a heartbeat” if Democrats received’t comply with the brand new measures.

There have been a couple of circumstances of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections through the years, however by no means sufficient to sway an election, and by no means as a part of a well-organized conspiracy to help a specific candidate. That’s doubtless as a result of federal voter registration kinds require individuals to attest to their citizenship and warn of legal penalties for falsely doing so.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) acknowledged earlier this 12 months that the supposed risk from unlawful voters has “not been something that is easily provable.”

Though Raffensperger mentioned voters are involved about noncitizens casting ballots, he declined to say whether or not they ought to fear when requested by HuffPost on Wednesday. Instead, he highlighted his personal previous work on the difficulty.

“I’ve been working on this long before this election cycle, long before 2020,” Raffensperger mentioned. “I’m a common-sense American.”

He famous that a current audit discovered that about 1,600 attainable noncitizens tried to register to vote in Georgia from 1997 to 2022. The state blocked all of them from registering, and none of them wound up casting ballots.

“If everyone had what was in place in Georgia, a lot of people would sleep better at night,” Raffensperger mentioned.

Despite Raffensperger’s boast, Georgia’s voting procedures grew to become a goal for Trump and his allies after Raffensperger licensed Trump’s loss in Georgia within the 2020 election.

The then-president infamously pressured Raffensperger to “find” the 12,000 votes he wanted to undo the consequence. Local prosecutors later charged Trump with unlawfully soliciting Raffensperger to violate his oath of workplace.

Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s demand and went on to win reelection to a different four-year time period as Georgia’s secretary of state in 2022. One political analyst mentioned then that Raffensperger trumpeted his opposition to noncitizen voting as a part of his reelection technique.

“He’s not doing this because there’s a problem that needs to be solved,” Emory University political science professor Andra Gillespie informed The Associated Press in 2022. “He’s doing this because he wants to try burnish his conservative bona fides with the base of voters who are going to determine whether or not he’s going to keep his job.”