Suppose you are chatting with your neighbor when, out of the blue, they mention their deep and abiding concern that unicorns are being killed by unscrupulous hunters.
Now, you have two choices. You can argue with them that unicorns aren’t real, or you could agree with them that hunting unicorns would indeed be a bad thing if it were happening and switch to talking about the weather.
My guess is a lot more people would do the latter. When someone is obsessed with an imaginary problem, there’s not a lot you can do.
But when the problem is political in nature, we tend to shift gears. If someone starts arguing with you about problems with the country that you know aren’t true, it’s hard not to try to question their claims and counter their arguments. That’s because the political solutions to imaginary problems are often real, and can cause very real problems down the road, as when John F. Kennedy’s purported “missile gap” with the then-Soviet Union led to a needless and expensive arms race.
There are times when arguing over an imaginary problem is counterproductive.
But there are times when arguing over an imaginary problem is counterproductive, and the current fight over bans on noncitizen voting is one of them.To be clear, noncitizen voting is about as much of a problem as unicorn hunting. A survey by the Brennan Center of local election officials in 42 jurisdictions with high immigrant populations found only 30 ballots cast by suspected noncitizens in 2016. A recent review by the Georgia secretary of state’s office found just 20 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state out of 8.2 million registered voters.
Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, which advocates for tighter voting laws, was only able to document 85 cases of alleged noncitizen voting between 2002 and 2023.
That hasn’t stopped GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans from making wild-eyed, unsubstantiated claims about widespread noncitizen voting. These claims usually are made to undermine faith in elections that Trump lost (including the popular vote in 2016), to bolster proposed new restrictions on voting or to advance a conspiracy theory about Democrats scheming to “replace” white voters with undocumented immigrants.
Amid all this rhetoric, Republican-controlled legislatures in eight states put measures on the November ballot that make clear that only citizens can cast ballots in state and federal elections.
It’s already illegal — not just in those states, but also everywhere in the United States.
Here’s the rub: It’s already illegal — not just in those states, but also everywhere in the United States. And it has been for a century.Noncitizens weren’t always barred from voting. In the first century and a half of the U.S., allowing noncitizens to vote was a popular way for states to attract immigrants, especially in the Western states and territories looking to grow. Noncitizens were allowed to vote in local, state and federal elections in 33 states at times between 1776 and 1924, when Missouri became the the last state to ban it amid rising anti-immigration sentiments.
Still, someone is always worried about those unicorns. In 1996, amid another wave of anti-immigrant fervor, Congress made noncitizen voting in federal elections a crime punishable by up to a year in prison — even though it was already illegal in all 50 states.
Little has changed since then. A handful of municipalities now allow noncitizens to vote in local races for school board or city council, but no state allows them in statewide elections, and noncitizen voting remains illegal for races such as senator or president. Still, the most recent round of claims by Trump and his allies led to this string of ballot measures this fall. It’s tempting to argue with supporters about the need for these laws. In Oklahoma, the state Constitution currently says that “all citizens of the United States” can vote. The proposed amendment would change that to “only citizens of the United States” can vote. Since no one is proposing allowing noncitizens to vote, this is a distinction without a difference. And even the measure’s authors admitted they haven’t seen any evidence of noncitizen voting in Oklahoma. In other words, this is an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem. No one will be particularly hurt by it, nor will anyone be helped. It’s straight-up Don Quixote tilting at windmills stuff.If these measures went further — by adding onerous new requirements to prove citizenship or proposing sweeping dragnets of the voter rolls — then they would be worth fighting. But arguing against banning something that’s already illegal makes you sound like you are defending noncitizen voting, which only convinces supporters that there is indeed something nefarious going on. In that sense, these measures are not unlike a lot of other “election security” measures passed by Republican lawmakers since the 2020 election, including new provisions that bar voting machines from being connected to the internet or third parties from handing out water bottles to people waiting in a long line to vote. Some of these laws are based on conspiracy theories, which is not great, but they also won’t really have an effect. In those cases, it’s best to focus on the real fights over voting laws that could cause serious harm, such as changes that allow activists to challenge tens of thousands of voter registrations based on spurious data. But when someone proposes an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem, sometimes the best thing you can do is nod politely and start talking about the weather.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
