WASHINGTON — Some of the conservative leaders of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election gathered in front of the Capitol on Wednesday and called on Congress to pass an “election integrity” bill to stop noncitizens from voting.
Leading the group, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., acknowledged that undocumented immigrants voting in elections is already illegal under federal law. “Some have noted that it’s already a crime for noncitizens to vote in a federal election, and that is true,” Johnson said.
But he argued that people know “intuitively” that noncitizens are voting, even though he could not provide estimates of how many. Multiple studies have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare in federal elections.
“I mean, the answer is that it’s unanswerable,” Johnson said. “That is the problem. … We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that. It will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states. We’ll have a mechanism to prove whether they are or not.”
A constitutional lawyer and close Donald Trump ally, Johnson played a pivotal role in Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election. He led the amicus brief, signed by more than 100 House Republicans, backing a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four key swing states won by President Joe Biden.
Johnson was joined Wednesday by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, two lawmakers whose text messages to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were featured prominently in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation into the attack.
Others on hand included a who’s who of MAGA conservatives. Among them were Stephen Miller, the former White House senior adviser to Trump; Jenny Beth Martin, the Tea Party Patriots co-founder who was outside the Capitol with a bullhorn on Jan. 6, 2021; and Cleta Mitchell, the conservative activist who was on the January 2021 call with Trump when he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,000 votes, enough to overturn the state’s election results.
Two other former Trump administration officials, Hogan Gidley and Ken Cuccinelli, also spoke Wednesday.
When asked at the news conference whether he accepts the 2020 election results, Johnson replied: “What we’re talking about today is the 2024 election.”
But he went on to say: “Nobody can go back and relitigate what happened in 2020. We know that there was ballot harvesting, we know that there was mail-in ballots. It was the Covid election. There was all sorts of irregularity occasioned by the pandemic, where states haphazardly put together new laws and opened up the systems and led to all sorts of confusion and chaos and concern that lingers even to the day.”
(“Ballot harvesting” refers to a third party, such as a family member, collecting voted ballots to return. Conservatives have lambasted the practice, but the RNC is embracing it in the 2024 elections “where legal.”)
Miller, who’s burnished a reputation in Washington as an anti-immigration hard-liner, attempted to troll the media and Democrats as he stood on the same House steps where Trump supporters had climbed and overtaken police officers on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Democracy in America is under attack,” Miller said. He railed against the “wide-open border and obstruction of any effort to verify the citizenship of who votes in our elections.”
Despite the lack of evidence of noncitizen voting, Miller echoed unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that Democrats are importing voters to help Biden win re-election.
Johnson first unveiled the framework of the legislation last month, standing with Trump during a visit to his Mar-a-Lago resort. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, would make it harder to register people to vote by requiring proof of citizenship. That could include showing a U.S. passport, a photo ID showing that the individual was born in the United States, or a birth certificate — documents that millions of Americans do not have access to, voting rights advocates say.
The speaker pushed back when NBC News pointed out that the legislation would not go anywhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate or be signed into law by Biden.
“This is not a messaging bill. This is one of the most substantive … most important pieces of legislation that will be presented within our lifetime, in our congressional careers. This is at the essence of what it means to have a constitutional republic. If people cannot rely upon … the integrity of that system, then we have nothing,” Johnson said.
“And so we’ll do it out of the House and we’ll send it to the Senate, and we’ll let Chuck Schumer decide whether he agrees with that sentiment or not,” Johnson said. “We’re not doing this for messaging purposes.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
