One top House Democrat is arguing that his Republican colleagues don't appear confident that they'll come away from the November election with satisfactory results, so they're already sowing doubt and mistrust about the result.
In a Thursday op-ed for The Hill, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-New York) warned that the GOP is showing signs of gearing up for a major post-election fight to discredit a potential loss. He zeroed in on former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-Louisiana) recent "doubling down on their efforts to undermine the sanctity of our elections, with the false claim that millions of noncitizens are voting in our federal elections."
He noted that claims about 2020 election fraud that were repeatedly debunked nonetheless became a primary motivator for thousands of Trump supporters to descend on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and attempt to forcibly overturn election results.
READ MORE: Johnson goes after nearly non-existent non-citizen voting
"Unfortunately, this history is repeating itself in real time," Morelle wrote. "We are watching the same cast of characters performing from the same script."
Morelle noted that even Johnson admitted that his claims that millions of undocumented immigrants supposedly casting fraudulent ballots was not "provable," despite his crusade. The House Democrat observed that the "myth" of massive non-citizen voter fraud has already been "debunked," citing research from the Brennan Center for Justice.
"It’s a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. It’s also a crime under every state’s laws. In fact, under federal law, you could face up to five years in prison simply for registering to vote. It’s also a deportable offense for noncitizens to register or vote," Brennan's Sean Morales-Doyle wrote last month. "Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare. That includes the Brennan Center’s own study of 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election."
"We found that election officials in those places, who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes, referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution," Morales-Doyle added. "In other words, even suspected — not proven — noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast."
READ MORE: (Opinion) 'By design': Johnson falsely claims Democrats are trying to turn 'illegals' into voters
Morelle argued that the fact that Trump, Johnson and the GOP are still crowing about non-citizen voting suggests they "clearly have contempt for the intelligence of American voters."
"Here’s the part they’re not saying out loud: Speaker Johnson and House Republicans are not actually concerned about noncitizens voting in federal elections," Morelle wrote. "They admit they have no evidence to back up their claims. Their real ambition is to lay the groundwork for blame and obfuscation to do violence to the Constitution and deny the people their say in the outcome of this election."
We have been here before. We cannot ignore the potential for another January 6," he added.
Click here to read Rep. Morelle's full op-ed in The Hill.
READ MORE: Though noncitizens can vote in few local election, GOP goes big to make it illegal