U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., on Wednesday warned there will be “hell to pay” if Congress doesn’t pass a controversial bill pushed by Republicans to ensure undocumented immigrants don’t vote despite that practice already being illegal.
Tuberville made the remarks at a news conference he attended with four other Republican senators urging the Senate to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.
“If we do not show the American people that the elections are going to be fair and they’re going to be satisfied with the outcome – no matter whether Republicans win or Democrats win – you are going to have hell to pay in this country,” Alabama’s senior senator said. “It’s coming, and I’m not so sure that’s not what the Democrats want. It’s an embarrassing situation, for me as a taxpaying American citizen for the last 35, 40 years, it’s embarrassing to know we have less control over our election system than we have on anything else.”
Not only is it illegal for undocumented immigrants to vote, virtually no undocumented immigrants are voting in American elections, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
“Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare,” the organization’s Sean Morales Doyle wrote in April. “That includes the Brennan Center’s own study of 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election. We found that election officials in those places, who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes, referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, even suspected — not proven — noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast.”
Critics of the bill say it makes it harder for American citizens to vote by requiring proof of citizenship.
“Americans do not need MORE obstacles to vote,” the League of Women Voters says on its website. “Instead of moving this legislation forward, Congress should protect voters in this critical election year by strengthening protections against discrimination in voting and expanding access to the ballot.”
