Elon Musk has claimed that the 2024 presidential election would likely be the last to be decided by US citizens, blaming an “influx” of illegal immigrants being allowed to vote.
The comments made by the South African-born billionaire on his social media platform, X, came in response to news that Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a bill requiring citizenship status to be added to the ten-yearly census, despite opposition from the White House.
“Unanimous Democrat opposition to requiring citizenship for apportionment of House seats and Presidential electoral college votes says it all,” Mr Musk said on Thursday in a reply to news that Dems voted along party lines on Wednesday and opposed the bill.
“The Democratic Party goal is to disenfranchise US citizens by importing as many illegal immigrants as possible.
“Given the massive influx of illegals from every country on Earth, 2024 will probably be the last election actually decided by US citizens,” he claimed.
Mr Musk often uses his platform to post an array of political views.
Despite voting for Joe Biden in 2020, he has openly criticised the President’s immigration policy, especially regarding the US-Mexico border, but he has also called to make the legal immigration process easier and quicker, which the President has stated he wants to do.
This latest post appeared to lean more towards the GOP’s viewpoint that immigration, particularly in the southwest, is running unchecked, leading them to pursue the legislation voted on on Wednesday.
The bill, known as the Equal Representation Act, was presented under the guise of making the way congressional seat allocations are made, fairer.
Currently, numbers are decided by looking at the total population within a state, using data including the decennial census, and that would include those who are non-citizens.
By adding in a rule to include citizenship status on the form, GOP lawmakers want to use that data to exclude non-citizens from the population numbers used to determine congressional seats.
“We should not reward states and cities that violate federal immigration laws and maintain sanctuary policies with increased Congressional representation,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said after Wednesday’s vote.
“Common sense dictates that only American citizens should be counted for electoral apportionment, and the Equal Representation Act ensures that.”
The states and cities which could be affected include Democrat-leaning New York and California, but also more Republican-supporting states like Texas and Florida, which have the highest foreign-born populations.
Despite the bill being aimed at Congressional seat allocations, Mr Musk tied this to non-citizens’ voting abilities.
Between 2018 and 2022, at least 80 per cent of Republican voters were White, while 30-40 per cent of Democrat voters were non-white.
In 2024, it’s expected that the percentage of the population’s Hispanic eligible voters will reach a record high, with California home to a quarter of them, according to the Pew Research Center.
Figures from the American Immigration Council show there are around 45.2 million people who count as part of the US immigrant population, which is around 13 per cent of the country’s total.
Out of those, around 53 per cent are entitled to vote as they are naturalised American citizens, rather than so-called resident aliens, those in the country on work permits or illegal immigrants.
The GOP-backed bill would target those who are non-citizens, seeking to keep them away from the ballot box.
Earlier this week, the Biden Administration spoke out against the bill, saying it “strongly opposed” the change, arguing that it would break the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which states the census should simply count the “whole number of persons” in each state.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to ensuring that the census remains as accurate as possible and free from political interference, and to upholding the longstanding principle of equal representation enshrined in our Constitution, census statutes, and historical tradition,” the White House statement read.
Claims, including those from Mr Musk, that introducing this bill would make elections more secure have been widely debunked, with one of the main reasons being that many states and municipalities do not allow non-citizens to vote in elections, anyway.
In November’s election, voters in Kentucky, Idaho, Iowa and Wisconsin will vote to change their constitutions to only allow US citizens to vote, following on from Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, North Dakota and Ohio in recent years.
In New York City lawmakers are trying to open up elections to some non-citizens, but the plan is not to allow anyone living in NYC to vote, regardless of immigration status.
Instead, those who are permanent residents – green card holders – and some with work authorisations would be allowed to vote in local elections alongside US citizens, rather than the “influx” of new arrivals seen in recent years Mr Musk appeared to point to.
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