Americans Accused of Noncitizen Voting Fraud Face Doxing and Intimidation

Eliud Bonilla, born in Brooklyn in a family of Puerto Ricans, is the same American. But in 2016, the father of two, who works as an engineer on NASA’s mission to reach the Sun, was suddenly removed from the voter rolls as a “non-citizen.”

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

Later, Bonilla voted without a problem, but the trouble soon turned into a nightmare.

A conservative election watchdog has obtained a list of suspects in the state non-citizen voters and posted it online, revealing Bonilla’s personal information along with the suggestion that he — and hundreds of others — had committed election fraud.

“My reaction was, ‘How dare you?’ It’s just, “How dare you make a statement like that,” Bonilla said of the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s 2017 report, Alien Invasion II.

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

Bonilla’s story underscores the real-world impact of an aggressive effort to purge the state’s voter rolls of thousands of would-be noncitizens who have illegally registered. Experts say many of the names come from newly naturalized citizens, the victims of an inadvertent paperwork error or the result of a clerical error.

MORE: Republicans ramp up election fraud claims ahead of November

“We’re seeing a large number of non-citizen suspects being identified and reported, but if you really dig into the details, you’ll find that many times these people are not actually non-citizens,” said Shawn Morales-Doyle, a voting rights advocate at the Brennan Center for Justice. non-partisan suffrage group.

“It’s happening because states are playing a little too fast and loose with the data they have,” he said. “A person who was a non-citizen green card holder when they got their driver’s license years ago may no longer be. Thousands of people naturalize in these states every year.”

Last month, the Justice Department sued the state of Alabama for allegedly removing dozens of local citizens and naturalized citizens from state voter rolls and a federal judge stopped the effort.

Virginia, the same state that wrongly fired Bonilla, has a Department of Justice sue to block the plan remove voters whose DMV records do not indicate US citizenship.

Tennessee election officials sent letters to 14,000 residents in June, threatening to remove them from the voter rolls if they did not prove their citizenship, but later backed off, facing a potential lawsuit.

Federal law bars non-citizens from running in federal elections, subject to up to a year in prison, deportation and denial of future legal immigration status. Although there are confirmed cases of illegal registration of non-citizens in each election, there is no evidence that they voted in significant numbers.

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

Brennan Center study of the 2016 election found only 30 cases of suspicious non-citizen voting out of more than 23 million ballots submitted.

The conservative Heritage Foundation, which supports a database of voter fraud found fewer than 100 cases out of more than 1 billion ballots cast between 2002 and 2022.

And 2017 is the year audit Pennsylvania state election officials found that a glitch in the state’s driver’s license system allowed 544 noncitizens to register and vote — out of 93 million ballots cast over 18 years.

A recently completed audit in Georgia found that simple 20 non-citizens More than 8 million voters were registered to vote, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said. Those registrations were canceled before next month’s vote.

After a fact-filled trial earlier this year, Judge Susan Bolton of the federal court in Arizona concluded: “The Court finds that, although it may happen, noncitizens vote in Arizona quite rarely, and fraud by noncitizens in Arizona is even rarer.”

Bonilla and several other voters whose personal information was exposed in the 2017 report sued Public Interest Legal Fund, claiming a “campaign of defamation and intimidation.”

The group argued in court that the list is a “public archive” maintained by the state and that it has a First Amendment right to free speech. He later apologized to Bonilla, redacted parts of the report and settled the lawsuit.

J. Christian Adams, the group’s president, said the effort was well-intentioned.

“We know that people who are not US citizens are registering and they tell the registrar that they are not a citizen before they are registered,” Adams said. “This is a problem. No one should be in favor of it, and no one should stand in the way of a solution.”

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

MORE: Noncitizen voting myth takes center stage in South Texas

“We are not talking about canceling the elections. It’s about a system that works as well as it can,” he said. “If you can find even one voter who was improperly removed from one of our promotions, then you win $1,000 in Omaha steaks from me personally.”

The Justice Department says similar efforts across the country have had just that effect. Still, Republican groups continue to pressure state election officials to remove suspected noncitizens from the rolls, with at least 24 lawsuits still active as of Nov. 5, according to the left-leaning legal group Democracy Docket.

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

“When you go to the point where you don’t look at the evidence and you let your prejudices take over and the rhetoric gets ugly, I think you’ve left the patriotic side,” he said. “I tell everybody, you have to vote. If you don’t vote, you don’t count.”

Americans Accused of Noncitizen Voting Fraud Face Doxing and Intimidation first appeared on abcnews.go.com