Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson talk about non-citizen voting. Experts say it's not an issue.

Former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday gathered at Mar-a-Lago to conflate a pair of conservative hot-button issues: border security and election security.

Johnson announced the GOP caucus in the U.S. House will present legislation requiring every person registering to vote to show proof of citizenship. It will also require states to remove ineligible voters from their rolls and databases.

"Everywhere we go one of the first issues people ask about is this issue of election integrity. The border is the number one issue in America," Johnson said in front of Trump's Palm Beach mansion and resort. "Election integrity is tied to the lack of border security."

The announcement, however, clashed with the assessments of voting specialists, including one formerly hired by Trump four years ago. It was criticized by immigration advocates as further demonizing immigrants in the United States.

A national elections expert said the allegations, accusations and claims of massive election fraud by people who are not citizens of the United States have long been debunked.

"We're talking about something that is almost a statistically zero problem," said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Nonetheless, Johnson stated his belief that there are "so many millions of illegals in the country" that if only one in every hundred cast a ballot it would amount to hundreds of thousands of votes.

"That could turn an election," he said, adding, "We will do everything within our power to insure that we do have free and fair elections in this country."

As for Trump on Friday, he did not address the proposed GOP legislation. But he again decried what he said was the Biden administration's "disastrous" border policy.

"As a citizen I demand the border has to be closed," he said. "Our country can't take it."

Trump again stated that he believes the number of immigrants that have entered the United States under the Biden administration, reported to be more than three million, is well into the eight figures.

"They are coming from all over the world," Trump again said. "Our country is like a dumping ground."

Elections expert: Voting by non-citizens a near 'zero problem'

Becker noted Georgia officials performed an audit of ballots cast in the 2022 midterm election and "found a grand total of zero votes" cast by non-citizens. And in the billions of ballots studied by the Heritage Foundation in the past 45 years, the total number of such instances found amounted to a few dozen cases, Becker said.

It's not a problem, he said, largely because of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 signed into law by then-President George W. Bush.

The 22-year-old law, a response to the 2000 elections, ended punch card voting systems, which contributed to the debacle in Florida balloting, and other measures. And, Becker explained, the law created a voter registration process and reaffirmed it is a serious violation of federal law to vote illegally.

"It was a big bill, it was bipartisan and W signed it," Becker said.

The law requires a prospective voter to provide a driver's license or Social Security number when registering to vote, he said, and those numbers are crossed-check against department of motor vehicle records to see what document was used to ascertain residency, either a U.S. passport or birth certificate, or an immigration visa or permanent residency card.

"If DMV has evidence you're not a citizen, you're not going to get registered," he said. "It very clearly requires a driver license number or Social Security number to register. And if you don't provide either, you have to show photo ID when you show up to vote. It's basically ID to register."

Becker also doubted the motivation of a non-U.S. citizen, who likely endured significant hardship to enter the United States, to risk it all by casting an illegal ballot.

"If you illegally registered to vote, or voted illegally, you are putting a big bull's eye on yourself. You will be discovered, you will be prosecuted and you will be deported," he said. "Why would anyone do that? It just doesn't happen, hardly at all, for that very easy-to-understand reason."

Trump has made election fraud claims for years. Hasn't backed them up in court

It's not the first time Trump has raised the specter of non-citizen voting. After he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, Trump tweeted: "I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

After taking office, Trump ordered the creation of a commission to investigate the claim of illegally cast votes. But the panel, led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, disbanded shortly after, not having found evidence of fraud.

At the time, Trump and those supporting his claims partly pointed to a report from the Pew Center to back up their assertions. But the CEIR's Becker said he intimately knows why the Pew center report did not support Trump's argument.

"The problem with that is I wrote that Pew report," Becker said. "That Pew report did not say anything about voter fraud at all. It was about how hard it is to keep voter lists accurate as people move."

Four years alter, Trump wildly expanded his baseless claim of election fraud alleging in a tweet that "Massive FRAUD took place with machines, people voting from out of state, illegals, dead people, no signatures — and so much more!"

To this day, said Becker, who has monitored every 2020 election audit and court challenge, Team Trump refuses to offer evidence of voter fraud for cross-examination and review in the judicial system.

"They have put forth the evidence," he said. "Every single time they back down."

Fraud investigator: Trump should pursue 'foundational, seismic' changes

Ken Block, who investigated claims of election fraud for the Trump campaign in 2020, said the announcement was a "big miss" for the 2024 GOP presumptive presidential candidate.

Block said his experience trying to confirm incidents of alleged voter fraud for Trump four years ago, including accusations of non-citizen voting, is that disproving the citizenship status of voters would require a massive investment in a database and other procedures.

A more fruitful pursuit, he said, would be to standardize state laws. For example, states should provide information on who cast an in-person vote. And that should be done within the timetable a candidate has to challenge the results before an election is certified. Block also said a third of states allow an early vote by a citizen who dies before Election Day to be counted, while a third don't and another third don't even address the issue.

"There are a lot of things that we should be fixing in terms of our elections." said Block, who documented his work for Trump in 2020 in a book titled "Disproven."

An even more "foundational and seismic" proposal, he said, would be for Trump to call for an end to gerrymandering of elections with skewed and patently unfair districts.

"If you're interested in free and transparent and fair elections, how can you have any of that when partisan elected officials can draw a map that screws their opposition?" he said. "That's tin pot democracy. That's not something the world's foremost democracy should have as a foundational element, but we do."

Immigration advocates braced for more demonizing of immigrants for political advantage

Immigration advocates said they were braced for another onslaught of ugly and incendiary rhetoric. The announcement followed Trump's recent escalation of border security rhetoric, in which he has repeatedly said people entering the country are coming from insane asylums and prisons. He has highlighted sporadic incidents such as cases in Georgia and Michigan where an undocumented immigrant has been charged with murder by local law enforcement officials.

This time, America's Voice research director Zachary Mueller said he expected an elections version of "replacement theory," a white nationalist, far-right conspiracy theory that states immigrants and non-white people are being lured to the country to change the racial and ethnic mix of America at the expense of the white majority.

"That is what they are getting at with this language around trying to quote unquote ban non-citizen voting at the federal level," Mueller said. "There isn't a nefarious conspiracy happening here but in fact this is a solution in search of a problem."

Mueller added that the more sinister effort is the one to undermine faith in the U.S. electoral system by whipping up immigration fear-mongering.

"They're leading people towards not only the great replacement but as well the kind of feeding of the election deniers that we saw end in a violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6," Mueller said. "They continue to lay that groundwork ahead of the November election and it's extremely concerning to us."

To that end, Mueller said Johnson's willingness to "lend" Trump the credibility of Congress "with the fig leaf of legislation" further will erode public confidence in the country's governmental institutions and beyond.

"This isn't just about immigrants, or hate, or vitriol or demonization to immigrant communities," he said. "What he is doing is taking immigrants as a vehicle to socialize a justification for undermining our democracy."

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Is non-citizen voting law backed by Trump, Johnson really necessary?