"Votes from illegals": Republicans are already preparing an excuse if they lose in November

Donald Trump is bullish about his chances in November and polling ahead of Joe Biden, but the GOP is preparing an insurance policy that blames election fraud by Democrats and undocumented immigrants if they lose. Speakers at the Republican National Convention made warnings of such a plot a prominent theme, mirroring similar efforts in 2020 to overturn the election results and disenfranchise millions of voters based on unsupported claims of mass fraud.

“We cannot allow the many millions of illegal aliens they allowed to cross our borders, harm our citizens, or disrupt our elections. We will not allow it,” declared House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who filed a lawsuit to overturn the 2020 presidential election results that was quickly thrown out by the Supreme Court.

Other Republicans explicitly accused Democrats of purposely allowing undocumented immigrants into the country so that they can illegally vote, even though the Biden administration recently passed measures to curb border crossings.

“Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., also claimed that Democrats "want illegals to vote now that they opened the border." Both Cruz and Scalise participated in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and instances of them breaking the law are extremely rare, with measures already in place to catch violators. In 2016, an audit in North Carolina found that 41 legal immigrants who had not yet become citizens cast ballots, out of 4.8 million total voters, and did not make a difference in a single election in the state. In 2022, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, conducted an audit of the state's voter rolls that found that all 1,634 non-citizens who attempted to register were denied by election officials.

Johnson acknowledged earlier this year that the voting conspiracy theory has “not been something that is easily provable.”

That has not stopped Trump from goading his supporters about it with a tone that suggests certainty.

“We must use every appropriate tool to beat the Democrats. They are destroying our country,” he said in a video message to RNC delegates. “Keep your eyes open because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly it’s the only thing they do well.” Trump's VP pick, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has said that if he was in former Vice President Mike Pence's shoes, he would not have certified the 2020 presidential election, as required by the Constitution.

If there's any organized conspiracy to subvert federal elections, it's the Republicans who have been caught in the act. In 2020, Trump and his allies endorsed a "fake elector plot" to submit fraudulent certificates from seven states to falsely claim that Trump had won those states. Two of the plot's architects, Trump's former trade advisor Peter Navarro and longtime Trump whisperer Roger Stone, received a hero's welcome at this week's RNC.