In the narrative that Donald Trump has developed surrounding this and past presidential elections, the myth of noncitizen voting looms large, casting big, scary shadows. Though we have no evidence of this happening in numbers significant enough to matter, it’s central to Trump’s wild but insistent claim that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have opened the borders so that migrants can come in to vote illegally and displace legitimate American voters. And that claim, in turn, is looking like the most important preemptive rationale for the inevitable Trump challenge to an election defeat. Earlier this year, House Republicans, led by Trump’s vassal Speaker, Mike Johnson, reinforced the narrative by passing a redundant federal ban on noncitizen voting (it wass already illegal, with violators being subject to prison terms and deportation).
But is there anything Team Trump can do to give a bit more credibility to the bizarre tales of massive noncitizen voting that he’s been repeating since his 2016 campaign? Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, seems to have found a way to raise suspicions without exposing himself to too much immediate refutation. In August, he ramped up........