SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Three days - just three days to go until voting wraps up in this presidential election, and both candidates are on the ground today in swing states, making their final pitches to voters.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: All right, Atlanta.
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HARRIS: Are we ready to do this?
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HARRIS: Are we ready to vote?
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DONALD TRUMP: Hello, North Carolina. This is going to happen. I have a - I predict - let's make a prediction. This will happen on Tuesday, I think, right? This will happen on Tuesday.
DETROW: We are down to the wire in the presidential race, and polling across the board has nearly every swing state in a statistical tie, meaning the election may come down to a couple thousand votes. Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign is exuding confidence, as is former President Donald Trump's. It could go either way.
But if Trump loses, like he did in 2020, he is ready to sell a story that he has been spinning for months.
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TRUMP: Because they cheat - that's the only way we're going to lose because they cheat. They cheat like hell.
And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in - they're trying to get them to vote.
They are a threat to democracy. The Democrats are a threat to democracy. That's the real threat.
DETROW: No matter who wins, in the coming days, we are going to hear a lot more from Donald Trump and his allies about the results. And if history is any guide, we can expect a mix of misleading information, rumors and outright lies. To talk more about it, somebody who's been covering it all for years - NPR voting correspondent, Miles Parks. Hey, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Scott.
DETROW: Let us start with what seems to be the most common talking point on the right when it comes to the election. Let's hear it.
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TRUMP: A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in - they're trying to get them to vote.
DETROW: Miles, we have talked about this before, but we need to talk about it again because we keep hearing it. What are the facts? Not the framing - the facts when it comes to noncitizen voting.
PARKS: Every single study has found it to be incredibly rare. A recent audit of Georgia's voter rules, for instance, found 20 confirmed noncitizens out of more than 8 million voters. That being said, Scott, it does occasionally happen. People do occasionally slip through the cracks whether intentionally or by accident. A person was recently arrested, for instance, in Michigan for being a noncitizen and voting, but that's the thing, and that's what election officials always go back to, is that there is a powerful deterrent here. You - if you are a noncitizen and you vote, that is illegal. And if you are arrested, that can risk your path to citizenship, which seems like acts like a pretty powerful deterrent.
DETROW: Consequences, serious consequences.
PARKS: Yeah.
DETROW: Still, a lot of conservative commentators and Republican lawmakers are echoing this narrative.
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MIKE JOHNSON: There's a number of states that are not requiring proof of citizenship when illegals or noncitizens register to vote. We know that's happening.
DETROW: That is the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, speaking to "Face The Nation." Miles, what's the reality here?
PARKS: It's a little bit complicated because Johnson is right. Federal law prohibits most states from requiring proof of citizenship to vote. That being said, it's not like states have no idea who's on their voter rolls. The vast majority of people register to vote using either a driver's license or a Social Security number. These are agencies that do have access to citizenship data.
So government officials have the ability to check the citizenship for most of the people on their voter rolls. And if they have a reason to believe that one of these people has cast a ballot illegally, they can refer that person to prosecution. That's the other important part here. Elections have records. There are ways to find this stuff out.
DETROW: But still, when it comes to a widespread systemic organized plan to do this, there's just no evidence of that. We have not seen that in the past.
PARKS: It's never been found. Right.
DETROW: Why then does this narrative of noncitizen voting, this false narrative, help Trump's broader false claims about election integrity?
PARKS: I think the sense from election officials I've talked to is that the election narratives of 2020 were starting to get a little bit stale. And so when you look ahead of 2024, what is the major political point on the right right now? It is immigration. And so what experts see is basically a marrying of these two narratives. You've got an issue that is very politically salient, and you've got Trump trying to kind of activate people on that.
The other thing I'll note in terms of why this is a successful election conspiracy theory is, like I mentioned, it does happen occasionally. Every election cycle, you'll see this - a few people get arrested for this. And so it's much harder to bunk a narrative like that that actually has a little bit of truth to it as opposed to voting machines are being controlled by a satellite or something.
DETROW: Yeah. Let's talk about a different narrative that we've been hearing a lot of lately. This is this idea of cheating.
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ELON MUSK: There is, I think, some amount of cheating that takes place. It's hard because they've - when you have mailing ballots and no sort of proof of citizenship, it becomes almost impossible to prove cheating is the issue.
DETROW: So that's Elon Musk, billionaire Trump supporter, who has pushed a lot of these baseless theories, especially on his social media platform, X, which used to be known as Twitter. What do you make of that? It's - this is happening, but it's impossible to prove.
PARKS: I mean, it just conveniently forgets that every time somebody votes, there is a record associated with that vote, right? That is what voter registration literally is. And so I would just urge people to go listen to what Republican election officials have consistently said, which is that voting by mail - yes - is marginally more vulnerable to fraud, but again, there has never been evidence that this is at a wide scale. When it does happen, usually at the hyperlocal level, it gets found out.
DETROW: Even as Trump tries to win Pennsylvania, which everybody sees as almost certainly the most important state on the electoral map, he is posting things like this just the other day on Truth Social. This is from Trump.
(Reading) Pennsylvania is cheating and getting caught at large-scale levels rarely seen before. Report cheating to authorities. Law enforcement must act now.
Any sense what rhetoric like this before the election is finished, before the results are in - any sense what he may do if he does lose Pennsylvania, if he does lose the presidential election?
PARKS: I think there's full expectation that if he loses Pennsylvania - that the idea will be that the vote was rigged. I mean, for four years, there have been calls from election officials from both parties for Pennsylvania to change how they count votes. There are rules in place that make it just take a lot longer to count mail ballots than they do to count in-person votes because they can't start until Election Day. What we are going to see almost certainly is that after the election, mail ballots, which are going to be largely Democratic votes at this point, are going to take longer to count than Republican votes, and so you can kind of see the writing on the wall of how Trump has messaged in situations like this before.
DETROW: Let's talk about one more thing here. We've been talking about the political rhetoric, but a lot of the stuff that really matters in terms of the election administration and vote counting is what happens in the courts, and we've already seen a lot of lawsuits in motion. What are they targeting, and what are the goals?
PARKS: So the RNC and the Trump campaign say that this is really just about maintaining safeguards for the election and making sure that, quote, "only legal votes are counted." But we're seeing lawsuits about all sorts of things - in some states, targeting entire voter rolls, saying states aren't doing enough to clean them; in other places, you know, targeting very specific aspects of elections, like the way people turn in their mail ballots and whether specific mail ballots should be counted. I think that part of this is not abnormal. You always see kind of election fights in the courtroom leading up to and then after Election Day. What's interesting this cycle, when you talk to election experts - it seems like the Trump campaign and Republicans more broadly are kind of already setting the stage for things, kind of giving breadcrumbs to issues that they might bring up to try to challenge the election results should Trump lose after the election.
DETROW: That's NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks. Thanks so much.
PARKS: Thanks, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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