Anyone who went to summer camp or attended a sleepover as a kid in the Midwest has likely participated in a snipe hunt. Whether you were the one left holding the pillowcase or part of the group pulling the gag, it’s usually a harmless prank all in good fun. Unfortunately, our current secretary of state and other Republicans are hyper-focused on the non-issue of non-citizens voting. They’re hunting snipe for sure, but it’s not good fun.
Indiana may have problems with voting, but ineligible people casting ballots isn’t one of them. Secretary of State Diego Morales has spent almost four years and countless resources scouring Indiana’s voting records for widespread fraud. The most he’s been able to uncover is one case in Vigo County that has yet to be adjudicated.
Indiana’s experience is like other states, such as Texas and Georgia, where partisan election officials went feverishly hunting non-citizens committing coordinated election fraud and instead ended up with a handful of unrelated cases usually involving a legal immigrant being misinformed of their voting eligibility. Organizations as different as the Brennan Center for Justice and the Cato Institute have both come to the same conclusion: non-citizen voting is astonishingly rare and does not impact the outcome of elections.
Voting Examined
So what’s the motivation for this big lie? To create doubt about the integrity of elections among the broad electorate so that if Republicans lose the midterms, it will be easier to get county election boards to refuse to certify the vote.
Claiming that ineligible voting is rampant also helps justify the documentary proof of citizenship laws that Indiana enacted in 2025, despite not having a single case of election fraud to justify the action. These new laws aren’t uncovering illegal acts by non-citizens but instead are forcing naturalized citizens to jump through an extra set of hoops to register to vote. This is clearly contrary to federal law, which says all voters must be treated equally. Common Cause Indiana and several other voting rights groups are challenging these laws, and our discovery in the case has shown that hundreds of eligible voters have been forced to prove their citizenship.
What’s the problem with that? No native-born citizen will be asked to prove their citizenship to register — so we’ve created a different set of rules for one group, i.e. naturalized citizens.
So why not force everyone who registers to prove their citizenship — like the federal SAVE Act would require? It’s simple. Estimates indicate 21 million Americans lack easy access to a birth certificate or passport — documents typically used to prove citizenship. There is significant time and expense involved in obtaining these documents, so it’s probable that a significant percentage of that 21 million would be disenfranchised by the requirement.
The crusade to ensure “citizen only voting” not only threatens to disenfranchise voters; it also threatens our privacy and the security of our voting list. When Morales eagerly turned over an unredacted copy of the Indiana voter file to the feds last summer, he put millions of Hoosiers’ personal information at risk.
This risk was acknowledged last month when a federal judge ordered the Department of Human Services and Social Security Administration to discontinue using unreliable information to target voters. The judge said “they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable. Since then, states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information. All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The judge is right. Indiana should tackle its real voting problem — low turnout — and give up the snipe hunt for good.
Julia Vaughn is the Executive Director of Common Cause Indiana. Common Cause is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy. The Washington, D.C.-based group was founded in 1970 and works to create open, honest, and accountable government that serves the public interest; promotes equal rights, opportunity, and representation for all; and empowers all people to make their voices heard in the political process.
