Trump and Mike Johnson push for ban on non-US citizens voting – despite it already being illegal

Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are planning to push a bill to ban non-citizens from voting during an appearance at Mar-a-Lago – something which is already illegal.

Mr Johnson is set to hold a press conference at the former president’s residence on Friday, part of longstanding Republican attack lines against Democrats. There is little evidence to suggest that non-citizen voting is a widespread issue throughout the different states. In a study of the 2016 election by the Brennan Center, researchers found that just 0.0001 per cent of voters across 42 jurisdictions, encompassing 23.5m votes, were suspected to be non-citizens who managed to vote — that is an estimated 30 incidents in total.

However, Donald Trump has incessantly laid down claims of election fraud and has subsequently spoken about his unsupported theory that migrants are in the United States because they are being “signed up” to vote.

“I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,” Mr Trump said at an Iowa rally in January. “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”

Non-citizens are already not allowed to vote in United States federal elections under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and no states allow non-citizens to vote at state-level, and in most local elections, either.

More recently, Mr Trump took to Truth Social on Wednesday to post a statement in an apparent response to reports that President Joe Biden may betaking executive actions to reduce migrant crossings.

However, the former president claimed that Mr Biden “opposes deportations” and “wants to turn his illegal migrants into voting citizens.”

Yet studies on