Under federal law, only American citizens can vote in American elections. But that didn’t stop House Speaker Mike Johnson from unveiling legislation a couple of years ago to ban noncitizens from casting ballots that they already can’t cast.

Asked at a press conference about the need for his pointless proposal, the Louisiana Republican replied, “We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.”

The House speaker’s use of the word “intuitively” stood out, in part because Johnson so frequently relies on evidence-free hunches to guide his policy preferences, especially when it comes to election denialism, but also because his answer captured a familiar sentiment in GOP circles: Republicans don’t know that noncitizens are voting, but they have insisted for years that it feels true to them.

It’s like watching an entire political party embrace “truthiness,” a word made popular by Stephen Colbert’s old Comedy Central persona.

Like Johnson, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has also long assumed that noncitizens are voting in the Lone Star State, and the scandal-plagued Republican even launched an effort to hold these ineligible voters accountable. It just hasn’t worked out especially well. NBC News reported:

For more than a year, Texas attorney general and GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton has been probing what he says is the large number of noncitizens who illegally voted in his state. So far, three people have been prosecuted, according to an NBC News review of court documents, public records and statements.

To be sure, others have been investigated as part of this same effort, but according to NBC News’ report (which has not been independently verified by MS NOW), some of those who were targeted proved to be American citizens.

I imagine some will look at these results and say that three alleged noncitizen voters is three too many. But more than 11 million Americans voted in Texas in the 2024 elections, and if the state attorney general’s office has managed to prosecute only three people, this helps prove that there is no underlying problem.

Joshua Blank, the research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, told NBC News, “The idea that fraud is a common occurrence in the electorate is a position that’s political but not backed up by any fact whatsoever. … The real challenge is that no solution is really going to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s probably because Texas isn’t the only relevant example. After the 2020 elections, Gov. Ron DeSantis created the Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security — an agency he created to pursue a problem that didn’t appear to exist in any meaningful way — as part of the Republican governor’s ambitious “election integrity” campaign.

Predictably, it pursued a variety of cases, many of which completely fell apart, proving the opposite of Republican conspiracy theories’ intended point.

Eventually, GOP officials should come to terms with the fact that noncitizen voting isn’t a problem, no matter what they find “intuitively” true.

The post Ken Paxton looks for, but struggles to find, noncitizen voters in Texas elections appeared first on MS NOW.

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From MS Now.