Judges who examined the lists questioned whether they were reliable at all .
Hours before Americans voted in the midterm elections that delivered a setback to Donald Trump, the US Supreme Court refused to let his government stop California from counting thousands of ballots it claimed were linked to “likely” non-citizens.
Trump has pointed to India in pressing for checks on whether all American voters are even US citizens. The US does not have a central poll body. Under a DHS programme called the ‘Unlawful Voter Initiative’, agents visited homes in nine states to question people about citizenship and voting. The push to remove non-citizens from voter lists did not fail wholly. Individual cases continue. When Trump argues for checking whether American voters are actually citizens, he points to India and Brazil. Claims of weeding out the infiltrators (non-citizens) continue.
India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has removed about 13 crore names from voter lists, though the Election Commission of India (ECI) has not published how many of those were found to be non-citizens. In Trump’s California focus, there are two Indians among the 28 people facing individual allegations of voter fraud. Each of its 50 states runs its own elections and keeps its own voter list. On September 25, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to offer states its SAVE citizenship database, which 27 states use, mostly those ruled by Trump’s Republican Party.
Political rhetoric, however, has been similar in both countries, focused on “infiltrators”. “If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” the judge wrote . The court said the department remained free to prosecute individual non-citizens where it had evidence that they voted illegally, but could not impose its own procedures on the state. Trump’s administration, meanwhile, also took its hunt for “non-citizen voters” to people’s doorsteps. Investigators were told to target those who had acquired citizenship by naturalisation, as opposed to birth, to check whether they had voted before becoming citizens. On November 2, the day the US top court refused to halt California’s doubtful votes from being counted, Home Minister Amit Shah addressed a BJP event in Hyderabad, where he said about 3 crore of the names removed were “infiltrators” or, more pointedly, “Bangladeshi infiltrators”.
