Eliud Bonilla, a Brooklyn native with Puerto Rican parents, is as American as they come. However, in 2016, the father of two who works as an engineer on NASA’s journey to the sun was immediately removed off the voter records as a “noncitizen.”
“I remember trying to make small talk with the clerk about what happened,” Bonilla said of his trip to his county election office in Virginia to amend the record. “She just matter of fact said ‘This happens a lot.'”
Bonilla later voted without incident, but the inconvenience quickly became a nightmare.
A conservative election watchdog group obtained a list of the state’s suspected noncitizen voters and released it online, revealing Bonilla’s personal details as well as the insinuation that he and hundreds of others had committed voter fraud.
“My response was, ‘How dare you?’ Just, ‘How dare you to make such a thing,'” Bonilla said of the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s 2017 study “Alien Invasion II.”
“I became worried because of safety,” he replied, “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 narrative demonstrates the real-world consequences of intensive efforts to clear state voter records of thousands of probable noncitizens who have fraudulently registered. According to experts, many of the identities are those of recently naturalized citizens who were the victims of an unintentional paperwork error or a clerical error.
“We see a large number of suspected noncitizens being identified and announced, but if you look into the details, you’ll notice that a lot of these people aren’t noncitizens,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, a voting rights advocate at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan election law organization.
“It happens because states are playing a little bit fast and loose with the data that they have available to them,” he told me. “A noncitizen green card holder who obtained their driver’s license many years ago may no longer be. Each year, thousands of people get naturalized in these states.
The Justice Department sued Alabama last month for allegedly removing dozens of native-born and naturalized people from the state voter rolls, but a federal judge halted the action.
In Virginia, the same state that wrongfully purged Bonilla, the Justice Department is seeking to prevent a scheme to remove voters whose DMV records do not show US citizenship.
Tennessee election authorities threatened to remove 14,000 residents from the voter registers in June unless they proved their citizenship, but eventually backed down due to a prospective lawsuit.
Noncitizens are prohibited by federal law from participating in federal elections, and they face up to a year in prison, deportation, and denial of future permanent immigration status. While there are verified incidents of noncitizens fraudulently enrolling in every election, there is little evidence that they cast votes in large numbers.
“This is a vanishingly rare phenomenon,” Morales-Doyle stated. “It is not happening at rates that are going to impact the outcome of our elections.”
A Brennan Center analysis of the 2016 election showed only 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting among more than 23 million ballots cast.
The conservative Heritage Foundation, which keeps a database of voting fraud cases, found less than 100 incidents out of over 1 billion ballots cast between 2002 and 2022.
A 2017 audit by Pennsylvania election officials discovered that a flaw in a state driver’s license system may have allowed 544 noncitizens to register and vote, out of 93 million ballots cast over 18 years.
According to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a recently completed audit revealed that only 20 noncitizens were registered to vote on a list of more than 8 million voters. Those registrations were canceled before the ballots were cast next month.
Following a fact-intensive hearing earlier this year, Judge Susan Bolton of a federal court in Arizona concluded: “The Court finds that, though it may occur, noncitizen voting in Arizona is quite rare, and noncitizen voter fraud in Arizona is even rarer.”
Bonilla and several other voters whose personal information was published in the 2017 study sued the Public Interest Legal Foundation, alleging a “campaign of defamation and intimidation.”
The group claimed in court that the list was a “public record” kept by the state and that it had the First Amendment right to speak out. It later apologized to Bonilla, changed some of the report, and resolved the lawsuit.
The group’s president, J. Christian Adams, stated that the entire initiative was well-intentioned.
“We know people are registering who are not citizens of the United States. And they inform the registrar that they are not citizens before being registered,” Adams added. “That is a problem. Nobody should support this, and nobody should stand in the way of fixing it.”
Critics of Adams’ group and others argue that they are inflating the scale of the issue in order to throw doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results, but he claims that is not the goal.
“This is not about rigging an election. This is about having a system that works as well as we can,” he explained. “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 claims that similar operations across the country have had the same result. Still, Republican groups are putting pressure on state election officials to remove suspected noncitizens from the records, with at least 24 cases pending before November 5, according to the left-leaning legal organization Democracy Docket.
Bonilla believes that while election integrity is a “worthy” goal and that he completely supports law enforcement, inflated reports of noncitizen voting are harmful rather than beneficial.
“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 told the audience. “I tell everyone that you need to vote. “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.”