Republicans push to ensure illegal immigrants aren’t skewing elections

Multiple Republican lawmakers are championing legislation to ensure that illegal immigrants aren’t distorting congressional and presidential races.

Although illegal immigrants and noncitizens generally are prohibited from casting votes in federal elections, they have the potential to impact congressional and presidential races.

This is because illegal immigrants can get tabulated in the census, which is used to apportion congressional seats as well as determine the distribution of votes in the Electoral College.

Last month, Reps. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), and Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) unveiled a bill titled the Equal Representation Act to ensure that illegal immigrants can’t be counted in the census.

“Since I’ve introduced the Equal Representation Act, the alarm has been sounded. Awareness and momentum to address the short- and long-term consequences of illegal immigrants influencing American citizens’ representation have continued to rise,” Edwards told The Post.

Thus far, over 70 members of the lower chamber co-sponsored the measure and Edwards voiced confidence “that number will only grow” amid concerns that “illegal immigrants to influence our elections is a threat to our democracy.”

Edwards’ and Davidson’s bill complements similar legislation with the same name that Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) rolled out last month as well.

Over twenty other Republican senators are backing the bill.

“It is unconscionable that illegal immigrants and non-citizens are counted toward Congressional district apportionment and our electoral map,” Hagerty argued at the time.

“While people continue to flee Democrat-run cities, desperate Democrats are back-filling the mass exodus with illegal immigrants so that they do not lose their seats in Congress and maintain electoral votes for the Presidency and hence artificially boost their political power.”

Thus far that bill has made little advancement in the upper chamber and is likely to face steep hurdles given the Democratic control of the Senate and the filibuster.

Ahead of the most recent census, former President Donald Trump unsuccessfully attempted to tack on a question about citizenship status while he was still in office.

That gambit drew fierce backlash from Democrats and was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court in 2019. Instead, the Trump administration requested government agencies to come up with workarounds to survey the population of citizens.

The Equal Representation Act would also require the US Census Bureau to include a question about citizenship status.

In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order mandating the census to count all residents regardless of citizenship status.

The next decennial census is slated to take place in 2030.

Once the next census drops, that data will be used to determine how many congressional seats and electoral votes a given state will earn.

Then states will consider whether to redraw their congressional lines and parties will seek to use that process to eke out any advantage over the other side that they can get.

At the moment, multiple states are still mired in skirmishes to redraw their districts including New York, despite the redistricting process concluding for most before the 2022 midterm elections.

Other states such as Wisconsin and Michigan also have ongoing battles over the state legislative lines.

Looming over the effort to ensure the census is exclusive to US citizens is the recent surge of migrants onto US soil.

Last month US Customs and Border Patrol recorded 156,000 migrant encounters near the US-Mexico border, down considerably from the roughly 302,000 encounters in December.

Border Patrol previously reported a record-breaking level of encounters for fiscal year 2023.