fronts, the Trump administration is going hard against non-citizen voting ahead of the
midterms.
There's the work with the U.S. Postal Service to send out mail-in ballots only to voters
on state citizenship lists.
There's a purported U.S. Census Bureau report claiming that 500 non-citizen voted in Wisconsin
in the 2020 election, and a new Department of Homeland Security investigative surge in
states, including Wisconsin, to prosecute non-citizen voting.
And yet, Wisconsin election officials describe non-citizen voting as vanishingly rare, because
it's already illegal.
What's going on?
We turn to Marquette University Professor of Political Science, Philip Rocco.
And thanks very much for being here.
Good to be with you.
So as to that question, what is going on?
Well, I think what we're seeing is a kind of multi-layer effort by the Trump administration
to kind of do January 6th every day, to keep alive the myth that there's widespread
non-citizen voting, to kind of delegitimize elections.
And it's not just kind of one instrument or one tool that they're using to do this.
They're using information from the Census Bureau, using enforcement power from DHS,
and using in a really irregular way the postal service in an attempt to gatekeep who votes.
And so I think what that tells us is that the administration is really hedging its bets,
both on what strategies it thinks it's going to be successful with, but also what the outcome
in a way of all of these strategies is going to be.
And they're kind of setting up, I think, some opportunities for themselves if one of the
strategies doesn't work out that they can sort of fall back on another.
Should ordinary voters be concerned about all of this?
Well, I think it's important to distinguish being concerned from being vigilant and aware
of what the facts on the ground are.
State and local officials are the people who are responsible for administering elections
in the United States.
The White House is explicitly not an entity that is allowed to do that.
The federal government is allowed in very limited instances to play a role in election
administration, but not the things that are happening now.
And so the information on how elections are going to run, how they're going to work comes
from state and local officials.
And in a way, those are the important people to be listening to and to make a plan to
vote is really important.
So I think to be aware, to be vigilant, but not to be sort of dismayed simply by looking
at what's happening in Washington, but knowing that the authority rests at the state and
local level.
So the Census Bureau report showed 24,000 non-citizens voted nationwide in 2020 and 500
in Wisconsin.
What was your reaction when you saw that Census Bureau report?
Well, my reaction was that it didn't show that at all.
The Census Bureau's own research has time and time again done record matching studies
of this kind and found false positives.
In other words, purported matches that weren't matches at all between two different lists
of individuals in excess of 6 percent of the sample.
And what we see here is a number of people who are alleged to be non-citizen voters that
is far smaller than that.
And so really, you can't distinguish what the Census Bureau, if indeed the Census Bureau
did this research, which is in doubt itself, found from no statistical evidence at all.
So there's also the process being developed by the Postal Service to send ballots and
envelopes with barcodes showing recipients are on state citizenship lists.
I know Wisconsin officials say the new system is nowhere near ready and ballots are already
being sent out.
So this disrupts the midterm elections potentially, including in Wisconsin.
Well, I think that if the courts are not successful in stopping this process from going forward.
And I think we have some indications to think that it's going to be difficult for the Postal
Service to play this role.
If not legally, then certainly operationally, it is a really heavy operational lift that
they are trying to pull off in a very short amount of time.
But I do worry about chaos.
And I worry about it not only because that's what might play out, but also because how the
appearance or image of chaos can make it potentially easier for the Trump administration
after the fact to say that this wasn't a legitimate election, and it's very similar
to somebody lighting a house on fire and then saying, oh, wow, this is a terrible
situation when they themselves have caused it.
There's the new investigation into states, including Wisconsin, on the part of the Department
of Homeland Security, as we mentioned.
What do you know about that and what investigators will be looking at and what's your reaction
to that?
Well, I think we don't know very much about that effort at this time.
It certainly seems to be an indication that the Trump administration, which has lost time
and time again in federal court cases, trying to force states to produce information that
is protected information about individual voters' personal details.
The Trump administration doesn't seem to be interested in abandoning that effort simply
because courts have said that it's illegal.
They are now going to use seemingly every tool in their toolkit to try to intimidate state
officials into giving them what they want.
It's kind of an extortionary activity.
But we don't really know exactly what these officials are going to be looking for and
what that looks like.
But I think it's another part of this multilayered strategy that we're seeing, which indicates
to me that the administration doesn't seem interested in giving up.
All right.
We leave it there.
Philip Rocha, thank you so much.
Thank you.
That was beautiful, bringing it all the way around.
Yeah.
Is that okay?
I feel like sometimes it's hard to know if you're saying anything at all.
Or nothing.
Yeah.
No, it was really good.
It was super clear, and like I said, you started with the multilayered effort and ended
with it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other thing is it's like, obviously, we need to be on alert, but also it's like being
freaked out.
Yeah.
I tried to strike a balance with like, listen to what St. local officials are saying.
That's the main thing.
Yeah.
Hopefully that.
It did.
It did.
It was hysterical, either.
You know, it's just an interesting mix.
Oh, we're in concerns, but yeah, Stairs doesn't help anybody.
So anyway, thank you so much for getting to take care.
Thank you.
Have a good weekend.
Bye.