The Big Lie
By: Juan Proaño, Norman Eisen, Andrew Warren, Gabriel Lezra
Executive Summary
The Big Lie of the 2020 election was that it was somehow stolen from Donald Trump. He and his allies repeated this falsehood for months, ultimately triggering the January 6 insurrection that shook the foundation of our democracy. The Big Lie was, at base, an attempt to silence the expression of choice of the U.S. electorate–and particularly of voters of color, most of whom had rejected him. Now, he and his allies are rolling out the Second Big Lie–in Spanish, “La Gran Mentira”–for 2024. It is an insidious myth centered on invented claims about immigrants and voting. It is already being perpetuated by Trump and his supporters, aimed at undermining public trust in the integrity of this election and at setting the table for them to, once again, claim victory regardless of the final vote tally. Its impact will outlive this election cycle, whatever its outcome; it will worsen political divisions in our already divided nation; and it will continue to create the pretext for nefarious actors to delegitimize election outcomes for years to come.
The Second Big Lie is a disinformation campaign using falsehoods about immigrants to sow doubts about an election. It’s a sad reboot of a very old story in U.S. politics: attacking communities of color to suppress their vote. In this case, the narrative’s power is rooted in reprehensible messaging on immigration: the falsehood around who is coming into this country and what they are doing. Partisans are binding this anti-immigrant message to their broader attempts to sow election doubt and to suppress the political power of racial and ethnic minorities as a growing demographic.
The incidence of ineligible persons voting is vanishingly small–so much so that it is most accurate to say that only eligible people vote in the U.S. Claims to the contrary are legally baseless, unsupported by reliable evidence, and widely debunked by scholars, experts, and election officials from across the political spectrum. This report reviews a broad spectrum of that data and analysis to debunk the myths about ineligible immigrants voting.
First, in Section II we explain the legal framework that unequivocally prohibits ineligible people from voting. This regime is an overlapping array of federal criminal statutes and immigration laws that criminalize and deter illegal voting and voter registration. The essay discusses how state and federal election security provisions create a multi-layered series of checks that further strengthen those federal protections, including, for example, by state verification of voter identity through national databases.
The system of legal safeguards, while extensive, is not perfect. But as discussed in Section III the data shows it works extremely well: investigations and audits by state agencies, independent researchers, and media organizations show that there is only a miniscule amount of ineligible immigrants registering to vote, with an even smaller amount who actually vote. In sum: the data unequivocally demonstrates that this quantity of votes is so trivial that it has zero consequence in election outcomes.
Section IV covers the Second Big Lie, tracing Trump’s history of false claims about immigrants before summarizing how his allies have followed suit. We then discuss related legislative initiatives intended to silence voters and how they may disparately impact minority voting groups.
Finally, Section V offers a range of solutions, including legislation, media and public information, voter outreach, legal avenues and other approaches. In proposing actionable solutions to combat disinformation about ineligible voters, this essay seeks to provide templates to push back against this false and dangerous narrative. In so doing, we aim to help safeguard confidence in this election cycle and in those to come.