Americans accused of noncitizen voter fraud face doxxing and intimidation

Eliud Bonilla, Brooklyn-born to Puerto Rican parents, is as American as they come. But in 2016, the father of two who works as an engineer on NASA's mission to reach the sun was abruptly purged from the voter rolls as a "noncitizen."

"I remember trying to make small talk with the clerk about what happened," Bonilla said of his visit to his county election office in Virginia to correct the record. "She just matter of fact said 'This happens a lot.'"

Bonilla later voted without issue, but the nuisance soon became a nightmare.

A conservative election watchdog group obtained a list of the state's suspected noncitizen voters and published it online, exposing Bonilla's personal information alongside the implication that he -- and hundreds of others -- had committed voter fraud.

"My reaction was, 'How dare you?' Just, 'How dare you to make such a claim,'" Bonilla said of the Public Interest Legal Foundation's 2017 report "Alien Invasion II."

"I became worried because of safety," he said, "because, unfortunately, we've seen too many examples in this country when one person wants to right a perceived wrong and goes through with an act of violence."

Bonilla's story highlights a real-world impact of aggressive efforts to purge state voter rolls of thousands of potential noncitizens who have illegally registered. Many of the names end up being newly naturalized citizens, victims of an inadvertent paperwork mistake or the result of a clerical error, experts say.

"We see large numbers of suspected noncitizens being identified and announced, but if you really get down into the details, you see that actually a lot of times these folks aren't noncitizens," said Sean Morales-Doyle, a voting rights advocate at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan election law group.

"It happens because states are playing a little bit fast and loose with the data that they have available to them," he said. "A person who was a noncitizen green card holder when they got their driver's license years ago may no longer be. Thousands of people are naturalized in these states every year."

The Justice Department sued Alabama last month for allegedly purging dozens of native-born and naturalized citizens from the state voter list, and a federal judge stopped the effort.

In Virginia, the same state that wrongly purged Bonilla, DOJ is suing to block a plan to remove voters whose DMV records don't indicate U.S. citizenship.

Tennessee election officials sent letters to 14,000 residents in June threatening to purge them from voter rolls unless they proved their citizenship, but later, faced with a potential lawsuit, backed down.

Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections subject to up to a year in prison, deportation and denial of future legal immigration status. While there are confirmed cases of noncitizens illegally registering in every election, there is no evidence they cast ballots in significant numbers.

"This is a vanishingly rare phenomenon," said Morales-Doyle. "It is not happening at rates that are going to impact the outcome of our elections."

A Brennan Center study of the 2016 election found just 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting out of more than 23 million ballots cast.

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

A 2017 audit by Pennsylvania election officials found that a glitch in a state driver's license system may have allowed 544 noncitizens to register and cast ballots -- out of 93 million ballots cast over 18 years.

A recently completed audit in Georgia found that just 20 noncitizens were registered to vote on list of more than 8 million voters, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Those registrations were cancelled before ballots were cast next month.

After a fact-intensive trial earlier this year, Judge Susan Bolton of a federal court in Arizona concluded: "The Court finds that though it may occur, noncitizens voting in Arizona is quite rare, and noncitizen voter fraud in Arizona is rarer still."

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

The group said in court that the list was a "public record" maintained by the state, and that it has a First Amendment right to speak out. It later apologized to Bonilla, revised portions of the report, and settled the suit.

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

"We know people are registering who are not citizens of the U.S. And they're telling the registrar that they're not citizens before they get registered," Adams said. "That's a problem. Nobody should be in favor of this, and nobody should stand in the way to fix it."

Critics of Adams' group and others say they're exaggerating the magnitude of the issue to preemptively cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results, but he says that's not the objective.

"This isn't about throwing an election. This is about having a system that works as best we can," he said. "If you can find a single voter that has been removed improperly from one of our actions, then you win $1,000 of Omaha Steaks from me personally."

The Justice Department says similar efforts around the country have had that exact impact. Still, Republican groups are keeping the pressure on state election officials to purge suspected noncitizens from the rolls with at least 24 lawsuits still active before Nov. 5, according to the left-leaning legal group Democracy Docket.

Bonilla says election integrity is a "worthy" goal and that he fully supports enforcement of the law, but that exaggerated claims of noncitizen voting do more harm than good.

"When you go to the point of not looking at evidence and letting your biases take over and have the rhetoric become ugly, I think you've left the patriot side at that point," he said. "I tell everyone, you have to vote. If you don't vote, you don't count."