Americans accused of voter fraud involving non-citizens face doxxing and intimidation

Eliud Bonilla, born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents, is as American as they come. But in 2016, the father of two, who works as an engineer on a NASA mission to reach the sun, was suddenly removed from the voter rolls as a “foreigner.”

“I remember trying to talk to the clerk about what had happened,” Bonilla said of his visit to the Virginia elections office to correct the records. “She just said, ‘This happens a lot.'”

Bonilla later voted without a problem, but the hassle soon became a nightmare.

A conservative election watchdog group obtained a list of suspects from the state non-citizen voters and posted it online, revealing Bonilla’s personal information and suggesting that he – and hundreds of others – had committed voter fraud.

“My reaction was, ‘How dare you?’ Simply put, “How dare you make such claims,” Bonilla said of the Public Interest Law Foundation’s 2017 report, “Alien Invasion II.”

“I became concerned about safety,” he said, “because unfortunately we have seen too many examples in this country where one person wants to right a perceived wrong and an act of violence ensues.”

Bonilla’s story underscores the real impact of aggressive efforts to purge state voter rolls of thousands of potential foreigners who registered illegally. Experts say many of the names are newly naturalized citizens, victims of an inadvertent documentation error or clerical error.

“We see a large number of suspected foreign nationals being identified and announced, but if you really dig into the details, you see that in fact, oftentimes, these people are not foreign nationals,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, a voting rights advocate at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan voting rights group.

“This is happening because countries are a little hasty and loose in using the data they have,” he said. “A person who was not a green card citizen many years ago when they obtained their driver’s license may no longer be a green card citizen. Thousands of people are naturalized in these states every year.”

Last month, the Department of Justice sued Alabama for allegedly removing dozens of native-born and naturalized citizens from the state’s voter rolls, and a federal judge he stopped the effort.

The Department of Justice is located in Virginia, the same state where Bonilla was wrongly exonerated lawsuit to block the plan to remove voters whose DMV records do not indicate U.S. citizenship.

Tennessee election officials sent letters residents in June, threatening to remove them from the voter rolls if they did not prove their citizenship, but later relented in the face of a potential lawsuit.

Federal law prohibits foreign nationals from voting in federal elections under penalty of up to a year in prison, deportation and denial of future legal immigration status. While there are confirmed cases of non-citizens illegally registering in every election, there is no evidence that they cast significant numbers of votes.

“This is vanishingly rare “It’s a phenomenon,” Morales-Doyle said. “This is not happening at a pace that will impact the outcome of our elections.”

Brennan Center test During the 2016 election, only 30 cases of suspected non-citizen voting were detected out of over 23 million votes cast.

Conservative Heritage Foundation, which maintains database cases of voter fraud, identified fewer than 100 cases out of more than 1 billion ballots cast between 2002 and 2022.

2017 revision Pennsylvania election officials determined that a glitch in the state’s driver’s license system may have allowed 544 noncitizens to register and cast ballots – out of 93 million ballots cast over 18 years.

A recently completed audit in Georgia found just that 20 foreigners According to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, more than 8 million voters were registered to vote. Those registrations were canceled before votes were cast next month.

Following a fact-packed trial that began earlier this year, Judge Susan Bolton of Arizona federal court he stated: “The Court finds that while it can happen, voting by noncitizens in Arizona is quite rare, and voter fraud by noncitizens in Arizona is even rarer.”

Bonilla and several other voters whose personal information was disclosed in the 2017 report defendant Public Interest Legal Foundation, claiming it was conducting a “campaign of defamation and intimidation.”

The group said in court that the list is a “public record” maintained by the state and that it has a First Amendment right to speak out. He later apologized to Bonilla, corrected parts of the report and settled the lawsuit.

J. Christian Adams, the group’s president, said everyone’s intentions were good.

“We know that people who are not citizens of the United States are registering and before they register, they tell the clerk that they are not citizens,” Adams said. “This is a problem. No one should be behind it and no one should stand in the way of fixing it.”

Critics of Adams’ group and others say they are exaggerating the severity of the issue to preemptively cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results, but he says that is not the goal.

“It’s not about calling an election. It’s about making the system work as best we can,” he said. “If you can find even one voter who was wrongly removed from one of our campaigns, you will win $1,000 worth of Omaha steaks from me personally.”

The Justice Department says similar efforts across the country have had exactly the same effect. Still, Republican groups are pressuring state election officials to remove suspected foreigners from rolls, with at least 24 lawsuits pending before Nov. 5, according to the left-leaning legal group Democracy Docket.

Bonilla says election integrity is a “worthy” goal and that he fully supports law enforcement, but exaggerated claims about noncitizens voting do more harm than good.

“When you get to the point where you don’t look at the evidence and you let your biases take over and the rhetoric gets ugly, I think at that point you’ve left the patriotic side,” he said. “I’m telling everyone, you have to vote. If you don’t vote, you don’t count.”