The bogus claim that illegal immigrants and outsiders are voting in elections isn’t new for us in New Hampshire. You may recall back in 2017 when Donald Trump and some state Republicans claimed that Massachusetts had bused thousands of people into New Hampshire to vote for Hillary Clinton, who had won the state and the national popular vote. Had someone gotten the bus voters on video? A quick photo? An eyewitness? Or better, a local election official documenting what would’ve been a felony? No. Even Trump’s own Election Integrity Commission couldn’t cook up any evidence before it was disbanded.
Readers will also recall the “stop the steal” campaign that followed the 2020 election and culminated in the January 6 insurrection. When Trump lost to Joe Biden, he sought every avenue to contest the result, pressuring red states (like Georgia, where he asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for 11,780 votes) and filing more than 60 lawsuits with his allies (remember Rudy Giuliani?). Courts across the country — including judges appointed by Trump — rejected those claims. But the facts did not kill the big lie. Trump has continued to repeat that he won the election, that it was stolen, that it was rigged.
After Trump’s 2024 victory, however, he and Republicans had nothing to say about a rigged election or rampant illegal voting by all those undocumented immigrants — even though several “blue wall” states went for Trump. No demands for investigations. No calls for recounts. No baseless lawsuits.
Now, eight months before the midterm elections, with Trump’s poll numbers tanking and recent state elections showing a Democratic swing, we see, plain as day, a renewed assault on our election system. It has been building for a year, with continued demands on blue states to release voter rolls, including here in New Hampshire, then the FBI raid in Fulton County, Ga. —a Democratic stronghold—where some 700 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election were seized based on the “stop the steal” conspiracy theory.
Currently, Trump is calling for the federalizing of elections, saying “We should take over,” while Republicans push legislation that would require a birth certificate or passport to register to vote (see the SAVE Act), and suggest that ICE should be present at polling places. Why? No evidence exists of widespread voter fraud — let alone meaningful levels of it. The specter of illegal “others” swinging elections is a political bogeyman, useful for feeding conspiracies, but unsupported by reality.
Let’s apply basic logic.
Imagine you are in the U.S. without legal documentation. You avoid attention. You avoid officials. You avoid paperwork. A traffic stop can upend your life.
Then on Election Day, you decide to walk into a public polling place, approach government workers, engage in a conversation about your identity and, if you’re allowed to proceed, commit a felony.
For what? One vote in an election with thousands or millions of votes? That is the grand theory.
Lacking any evidence and defying basic logic, Trump and the Republicans push on with the help of Fox News and conservative media. The bogeyman helps distract from real things like outrageous health insurance premiums, increasing electricity rates, sky-high housing prices, continuing grocery receipt shock, exorbitant child care costs and, especially here in New Hampshire, rising property taxes.
So here we are, with the elected president attacking our election system — one that states and local communities have run for more than 200 years. All of it based on a conspiracy theory mobilized to undermine democracy and secure more power. And the perpetrators of the lie are spouting it here in New Hampshire, too, as if any Democratic-leaning town and state must have “illegals” voting because progressive candidates cannot win elections fair and square. Or they shouldn’t.
Fittingly, the spurious “stop the steal” slogan has become reality in our upside-down world. Patriotic locals — staffing and securing polling places here and across the nation — are on the front lines of a sustained assault. But protecting our elections isn’t just their job: Every citizen has a role in defending our sacred election process. In America’s 250th year, upholding our elections means standing with the people who run them and the voters they serve against those who would subvert the system for their own destructive political power.
John M. Rodgers is a writer and contractor living in Sunapee.