US House Passes Trump-Backed Non-Citizen Voting Bill

The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, fueled by Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, passed a bill Wednesday that would ban noncitizens from registering to vote in federal elections, a rare practice that is already illegal.

Less than four months before Trump faces Democratic President Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 election, the House passed the measure by a vote of 221 to 198 based on allegations that people who illegally crossed the border into Mexico could cast ballots in this year’s presidential and congressional elections.

The bill will now go to the Democratic-led Senate, where it will likely die once it gets there.

Dubbed the American Voter Eligibility Protection Act, the bill would require people to show proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote and would force states to exclude suspected non-citizens from voter rolls.

It is already a crime for a noncitizen to vote in federal elections, and independent studies have shown that this sort of thing happens only rarely.

Democrats oppose the bill, describing it as a voter suppression effort that targets key Democratic constituencies with a Trump-inspired message calculated to undermine public confidence in the U.S. electoral system.

“The bill will do nothing to protect our elections,” the White House said in a statement this week. “But it would make it much harder for eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters will be dropped from the voter rolls.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a speech before the vote that failure to support the bill “would hand our country over to illegal immigrants, cartel traffickers, and violent, murderous criminals.”

Trump, who supports the bill, continues to repeat false claims that the 2020 election was stolen because of massive voter fraud.

Source: Terra

Rose

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