In South Texas, the myth of non-citizen voting takes center stage

This story is part of ABC News’ month-long series “Protecting Your Vote,” profiling people across the country who are dedicated to ensuring the integrity of the election process.

Cecilia Castellano woke up to the sound of her doorbell in the early hours of August 20. The South Texas sky outside her Atascosa County home was still dark, but as she walked out of her bedroom, curlers in place, a dress draped over her. shoulders – a light crossed his hall.

Two voices from the other side of his front door announced, “Police Department.”

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“I got to the front and I looked out the window…and they were shining a flashlight in my window,” Castellano recalled in an interview with ABC News’ Mireya Villarreal. “They said, ‘Ma’am, we have a search warrant.’ I said, “A search warrant for what?” And they say, “Well, can we go in?”

Officers presented Castellano with the warrant, then confiscated her phone and asked her to write down her PIN, she said.

They were seeking evidence of so-called “vote harvesting,” an opaque provision of a 2021 voter integrity bill championed by the state’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and enforced by his attorney controversial general, Ken Paxton.

Both men called the law, widely known as SB 1, a safeguard against non-citizen voting — an extremely rare phenomenon already banned under federal and state laws. But Castellano, a Democratic candidate for a seat in the Texas State House, calls it voter intimidation.

“Everything I’ve done – everything my team has done – has been knocking on doors,” Castellano said. “That’s why I was caught off guard. And to this day, I went from fear to anger to (thinking) that they violated my civil rights – they really tried to ‘intimidate.”

Castellano, a third-generation Mexican American — who is a grandmother and business owner — launched her bid for public office without hoping to attract widespread attention. But in the aftermath of August 20, his campaign became a flash point in the national debate over non-citizen voting.

Castellano was among several prominent Texas Latinos who were targeted in Paxton’s vote-harvesting investigation, which he said was precipitated by “sufficient evidence” of voter fraud. A county prosecutor outside San Antonio referred allegations of “voter fraud and vote harvesting” to the attorney general’s office in 2022, according to Paxton’s August statement.

No charges have been filed in this case.

“Why do they come to areas where there are a majority of Latinos?” Villarreal asked Castellano.

“Because they’re trying to intimidate Latinos,” Castellano responded.

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Republicans, like former President Donald Trump, have claimed without evidence that undocumented immigrants could tip the scales in favor of Democrats in November, increasingly promoting the debunked narrative as the centerpiece of their argument to voters in the months leading up to election day. .

“Our elections are bad,” Trump said during the ABC News presidential debate in September. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants that are coming in are trying to get them to vote. They don’t even speak English, they don’t even know what country they’re in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and it’s why they allow them to come to our country.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, recently tried unsuccessfully to pass a law that would require voters to prove their U.S. citizenship through documentation — instead of attesting it under penalty of perjury as current laws require it — arguing in May that, “We all know intuitively that many illegal immigrants vote in federal elections.”

But critics and election experts say that simply isn’t true and accuse Trump and his allies of generating unfounded and spurious claims that non-citizen voting as part of an effort to make it harder registration and voting of eligible voters. The libertarian Cato Institute has called claims of widespread non-citizen voting “alarmist theorizing,” and Pennsylvania’s Republican elections official recently admitted that he “has seen this happen very, very, very rarely.” .

The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, found that less than 0.0001 percent of votes cast in the 2016 election came from presumed non-citizens.

“Noncitizen voting is an extremely rare phenomenon,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, a voting rights expert at the Brennan Center. “It is a crime for a non-citizen to register to vote in state and federal elections, or to vote. Consequences include prison time, heavy fines, and deportation.”

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“It is simply mind-boggling to think that someone who has decided to move his family to the United States and try to build a life here is going to risk all of that, risk his freedom and his presence in the United States . — to vote in an election,” he said.

Despite this, leaders in a handful of Republican-led states have used the threat of large-scale non-citizen voting to justify massive purges of their voter rolls, including in Tennessee, Alabama, and Ohio. and in Texas – where Governor Abbott has bragged about removing more than a million names from the rolls since 2021, when SB 1 was passed.

In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin said he had removed more than 6,000 people suspected of being noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls — but a Washington Post investigation found no examples of noncitizens voting during his mandate. And on Friday, the Justice Department sued Virginia for allegedly violating federal rules prohibiting states from removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of an election. Youngkin called the lawsuit a “politically motivated action” aimed at “interfering in our elections.”

As the national debate over non-citizen voting rages, Castellano has pledged to continue her campaign. During a recent afternoon of door-to-door canvassing in Jourdanton, Texas, where she was being followed by a group of reporters, two police cars approached Castellano.

“I’m actually the candidate for state representative for District 80,” Castellano told officers, explaining that the cameras following her were reporters following her campaign.

“I can’t wait to win your vote, men in blue, women in blue,” she told the officers.

Protect your vote: In South Texas, the myth of non-citizen voting takes center stage, originally published on abcnews.go.com