In the final days of the 2024 election, Republicans are hammering home the lie that there is widespread voting by noncitizens.

“Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” former President Donald Trump said during the September presidential debate with his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. “They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”

On one level, Trump is once again vilifying immigrants and echoing the white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory that asserts the left is trying to “import” voters to take the place of white Americans. But behind the lie is a widespread attempt to purge thousands of people, including U.S. citizens, from voter rolls. In the event Trump loses the election, this lie will likely undergird his all-but-assured campaign to declare the result rigged.

Republicans have raised the prospect of noncitizens voting for years. Trump infamously said he would have won the popular vote in 2016 but for “millions of people who voted illegally” ― a false claim for which neither Trump nor the man who started the lie, right-wing activist Gregg Phillips of the conspiracy theory group True the Vote, ever provided any evidence. As president, Trump created a shady Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity meant to investigate his false claim that millions had voted illegally. The commission shut down in 2018 without publishing any evidence of widespread voter fraud.

This time it’s worse.

“There was an explosion this year of how central this [lie] was,” said Zachary Mueller, senior research director at America’s Voice, an immigrant rights group that advocates for a path for citizenship for undocumented people. “I’ve been following this issue for many, many years, and there was a notable uptick this year.”

The lie is everywhere.

CBS News obtained a video this week of a Republican Party official and local “election integrity” leader in North Carolina telling volunteers that voters with “missing” information and “Hispanic-sounding last names” should be treated as “suspicious” if registered to vote in the final three months before Election Day.

James Womack, the Lee County Republican Party chair and founder of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, told CBS News he’d need to see the “full context” of his own remarks to comment on them. Womack’s group was building the list of “suspicious” voter registrations to hand over to election officials, endangering the ability of people on the list to cast a ballot. He didn’t respond to HuffPost’s questions about what that context was.

Illegal voting by noncitizens, according to all available data, is extremely rare ― “there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome,” according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

On Wednesday, for example, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said an audit of his state’s voter rolls had found that out of 8.2 million registered voters in the state, just 20 turned out to not be U.S. citizens. Of those, only nine had ever voted in past elections, the Republican official said. Nationwide, noncitizens face criminal consequences and potential deportation for voting illegally, and election officials use federal databases and other methods to confirm voters’ eligibility.

Republicans have nevertheless made every attempt to create the impression that noncitizen voting is a major problem. Voters in eight states this year, for example, will decide on ballot measures to prohibit noncitizens from voting, even though it’s already illegal except for a handful of localities that allow noncitizen residents to vote on local issues.

In April, pushing the “SAVE Act,” a bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) participated in a news conference with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida private club, and accused Democrats of scheming to somehow allow ineligible immigrants to vote.

“We believe one of the reasons for this open border... is because they want to turn these people into voters,” Johnson said. He added later: “We cannot wait for widespread fraud to occur, especially when the threat of fraud is growing with every single illegal immigrant that crosses that border.” (The following month, Johnson admitted that widespread voting by noncitizens had “not been something that is easily provable.”)

Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has spent tens of millions of dollars to help elect Trump, regularly shares similar lies and misrepresentations on X, his social media platform formerly known as Twitter, as have other influential right-wing accounts.

Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who joined Trump on his now infamous Jan. 2, 2021, call to Raffensperger, when Trump tried to pressure the Georgia official to “find” enough votes to make Trump the state’s winner, launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) in 2021 in part to cancel thousands of supposedly suspicious voter registrations nationwide.

“The Democrats’ plan for 2024 is to change the electorate,” Mitchell said last month, testifying in support of the SAVE Act. “If they cannot persuade the American People to want their Marxist policies for America, just import voters who don’t speak the language, don’t have a shared commitment to our country and our national principles, get them into the very porous voter registration system, and collect their votes.”

Womack is affiliated with the Election Integrity Network, which itself is also part of a much larger Trump-aligned network. Video of Mitchell’s remarks is featured on the webpage for the Only Citizens Vote coalition, which lists dozens of member groups, including powerful, deep-pocketed players in the election denial universe.

There is no evidence at all that Democrats ― or any others ― are working to induce noncitizens to vote.

Nonetheless, polling shows Republicans believe the rhetoric. Though large majorities of voters supporting both Harris and Trump think it’s important to stop noncitizens from voting, only 35% of Trump supporters are very or somewhat confident that noncitizens will be stopped from voting, compared with 92% of Harris supporters, according to survey results from Pew Research Center released Thursday.

One practical effect of this lie is that GOP officials in several states have cited concerns over supposed noncitizen voting in attempts to purge thousands of people from voter registration lists.

Sometimes voter registration purges ― or “list maintenance” ― happen for valid reasons, such as regular updates for when a voter’s death is confirmed by government records or when a voter confirms to election officials they’ve moved to another state.

Republicans, ironically, have made this kind of day-to-day data much harder to confirm, with GOP officials in several states exiting a multi-state organization (the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC) that encouraged information-sharing and split the cost of expensive databases.

In its place, right-wing citizen activists have used new, error-prone software to challenge thousands of registrations at a time at the local level, even though the vast majority of these challenges are false positives. At the same time, the Republican Party and its allies have pursued lawsuits to force election officials to remove more people from the rolls, despite a federal prohibition on “systematic” purges within 90 days of an election. The 90-day “quiet period” is meant to ensure voters have sufficient time to prove their eligibility in the event they are mistakenly removed from the rolls.

In Alabama earlier this month, a federal judge ordered Secretary of State Wes Allen to stop the deactivation of more than 3,200 supposed “Noncitizens Registered to Vote in Alabama.” Allen’s August press release announcing the purge alleged people on the list had, at least at one point, “been issued noncitizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security.” It granted that it was “possible” some people on his list had actually since become citizens and eligible voters but added, less than two months before Election Day, that “those naturalized citizens” would have to update their voter registration information. He also referred the entire list to the state’s attorney general for “investigation and possible criminal prosecution.”

The purge list included at least one U.S.-born citizen, NPR reported, and a lawsuit from civil rights groups listed several more citizens swept up in the purge, both naturalized and U.S.-born, including one man who simply “mistakenly checked a box on an unemployment benefits application identifying himself as a noncitizen” before correcting the error two years ago. State officials’ testimony showed that at least 2,000 people on the list ― nearly two-thirds ― were citizens and legal voters. U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco, a Trump appointee, noted in her order earlier this month that Allen “admitted that his purge list included thousands of United States citizens.”

Allen told HuffPost in a statement that he was “limited” in his ability to comment due to the ongoing litigation. He said he would comply with the court’s order and added, “State and federal laws are clear that only eligible American citizens can vote in our elections. Last week’s order does not change that.”

Similar GOP suits seeking purges and alleging improper voter list maintenance have been dismissed in Nevada and Michigan. A separate ongoing suit in Nevada alleges thousands of noncitizens are on the voter rolls ― even though the state’s then-Republican secretary of state debunked the claim in 2021 ― and that noncitizen voting “favors Democratic candidates and harms Republican candidates.” Last week, a Trump-appointed judge in North Carolina shot down Republicans’ attempt to invalidate 225,000 voter registrations in the state. Separately, judges in Michigan and North Carolina have shot down Republican suits targeting military and overseas voters.

In Virginia on Friday, a federal judge ordered the state to restore the voter registrations of over 1,600 people who the state had purged since August – during the 90-day “quiet period” before Election Day. The supposed noncitizens had been targeted by the governor because they chose “No” in response to questions about their citizenship status on certain Department of Motor Vehicles paperwork. The Justice Department and civil rights groups had sued the state over the quiet period purges, arguing the DMV data is unreliable, particularly because people often interact with the DMV before eventually gaining citizenship and becoming eligible to vote. Others could have simply made a mistake on paperwork.

The Justice Department cited one county board meeting in which a registrar noted that of dozens of purged “noncitizens” who’d previously voted, “Every single one of them had verified their citizenship previously, some as many as five times, and they all had Social Security numbers. We had to cancel them, because of state protocol.” He later said the majority of that group had re-registered. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin promised Friday to appeal.

A spokesperson for Youngkin separately pointed HuffPost to a Fox News appearance in which the governor disputed the term “purge” and said people removed from voter rolls were first given “14 days to affirm they are a citizen” or otherwise cast a provisional ballot.

In a statement to HuffPost, a Trump campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, falsely accused Democrats of “pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country” and accused the Justice Department of pursuing “lawfare” against Youngkin. Democrats, the statement added, “aren’t even trying to hide their election interference schemes.”

This summer, Tennessee officials sent letters to thousands of voters telling them their information “matches with an individual who may not have been a United States citizen at the time of obtaining a Tennessee driver license or ID card” and warning that voting as a noncitizen was a felony punishable by two years in jail. It was only after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened legal action that the state clarified it wouldn’t be purging voters who didn’t respond to the letter with citizenship documentation.

And in August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) bragged of purging more than 6,500 supposed noncitizens from the rolls since 2021. Journalists have since determined there are numerous citizens on the list, and the clerk in Travis County, home to Austin, reported call centers were flooded with people concerned about their registration status as a result of the purge.

Abbott’s purge announcement was part of a pattern of Texans Republicans hyping up supposed noncitizen voting, including the announcement of an “undercover operation” investigating voter registration efforts and a lawsuit filed this week demanding that the federal government help determine the citizenship status of 450,000 Texans who registered to vote without providing a driver’s license or ID. (Registering without a driver’s license or state ID is legal; applicants can use a Social Security number instead, which “the state verifies ... is authentic,” a spokesperson for the secretary of state said this month. All voter registration applicants affirm they are citizens under penalty of perjury.)

Biden administration officials have pointed out that there is a federal service for confirming citizenship status. It’s known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements service, or SAVE, and multiple states have used it for over a decade for list maintenance. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a suit Tuesday against the Biden administration anyway, saying the service was “not an adequate tool” for verifying citizenship and noting that there was a fee to use the service. The state of Florida filed a similar suit earlier this month.

Judges may continue to thwart many of these efforts, but even halted purges or lawsuits work to spread the lie of widespread noncitizen voting, and they could intimidate voters who fear being punished despite being valid voters.

As election law professor Ben Berwick of the group Protect Democracy observed to The Guardian, they could also turn into “zombie” lawsuits, used to contest the outcome of the election after it occurs.

“They’re dead on arrival but will be resurrected after the election,” Berwick said. “I am virtually certain that election deniers will focus on these narratives in the post-election period, both to discredit results they don’t like and as the basis for post-election legal challenges to try and throw out certain ballots or even interfere with certification of results.”

If the effort fails in the courts, Trump and his allies could also simply use the specter of noncitizen voting ― even if it’s never established by any evidence, as was the case with lies about widespread voter fraud in 2020 ― as grounds to reject the election results anyway.

“I realized that we needed to focus on this threat of illegals voting in November because I absolutely believe that that is how they are planning to try to steal the election this year,” Mitchell told key Trump ally Charlie Kirk in June, in a conversation flagged by the investigative outlet Documented. She added that left-wing nongovernmental groups were supposedly “shepherding these migrants all over the country getting them IDs, getting them housing, paid phone cards and food cards and getting them on the voter rolls.”

Earlier this month, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) authored a letter signed by dozens of Republican lawmakers, including several who voted to overturn the 2020 election results, uncritically alleging that Texas and Virginia authorities had removed thousands of noncitizens from their voter rolls even though the removed voted registrations have been shown to have included U.S. citizens.

“Clearly, there is a non-negligible amount of voter participation by non-citizens in federal elections, which is not only a serious threat to the integrity of our elections and the democratic process they represent, but also has the potential to reduce Americans’ trust and confidence in election results,” they wrote. A spokesperson for Hagerty told HuffPost, “These statistics show that there are unquestionably noncitizens who are registered to vote, which is a federal crime.”

“All of the allegations against immigrants — demonizing immigrants, alleging that immigrants who are not allowed to vote are voting, basically trying to make it so that all immigrants are scared of voting ― that’s preparation for refusing to accept the results if their candidate loses,” Sylvia Albert of Common Cause told Mother Jones recently.

The lie of widespread noncitizen voting is also manifesting in the voting process itself, which could intimidate voters.

Last month, The New York Times reported on a call of Republican activists focused on supposed noncitizen voting in which a GOP chair from Georgia suggested using school enrollment records to find neighborhoods with large numbers of migrants, and an activist in the Detroit area recommended searching voter rolls for “certain types of surnames,” in the newspaper’s words, and hanging up signs in “ethnic” neighborhoods.

The conspiracy theory group True the Vote has drafted letters to hypothetical prospective noncitizen voters in several languages, titled “A Message From True the Vote to Non Citizens.”

“We understand that there may be people who are talking with you about voting in an American election,” the letter states. “Please know that these people are misleading you. And they’re putting you and your family at risk.”

Around the country, signs have appeared at polling places warning noncitizens about criminal penalties for illegal voting, some placed by activists, others required by election officials.

“If I was a monolingual Spanish speaker, I’m voting for the first time, just became a citizen and that is the only sign that I see, I’m going to question myself, even though I know I’m in the right, and I’m a citizen and I can vote,” Iliana Santillan, executive director of El Pueblo, a North Carolina-based Latino advocacy organization, told WNCN-TV of one bright yellow example seen around the state. The signs came from the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, Womack’s group.

“Noncitizens who wisely choose not to vote have nothing to fear,” Womack told WNCN.

The same report noted another sign, from Only Citizens Vote, that was taken down on orders from the North Carolina State Board of Elections because it used the word “extranjero” (“foreigner”) rather than noncitizen.

“Therefore, that sign, this particular sign by Only Citizens Vote, was inaccurate and misleading because it stated that it is a crime essentially for a foreigner to vote,” Durham County Board of Elections Director Derek Bowens said. On a call Thursday, the executive director of North Carolina’s elections board, Karen Brinson-Bell, confirmed that a “group or groups have produced signs that are not accurate in their translation” and that “a foreign-born individual may very well be a citizen and eligible to vote, and that’s why we instructed the counties to remove those signs.” Only Citizens Vote did not respond to a request for comment.

Targeting the supposed scourge of noncitizen voting has a decades-old history in American politics, including with Trump’s own allies.

Last year, during a podcast taping with Trump allies Steve Bannon and Kari Lake, Rudy Giuliani admitted to a “dirty trick” that he said his campaign for New York City mayor played in 1993.

“So they went through East Harlem, which is all Hispanic, and they gave out little cards, and the card said, ‘If you come to vote, make sure you have your green card because [the Immigration and Naturalization Service] are picking up illegals.’ So they spread it all over the Hispanic...” Giuliani trailed off.

“That’s the way we kept down the Hispanic vote,” he added later, before correcting himself at Lake’s urging. “The Hispanic illegal vote, which takes away the Hispanic legal vote.”