The noncitizen has become the organizing figure of U.S. election machinery.
From DHS fraud officers manufacturing noncitizen-voting evidence and the threatened deployment of immigration agents at polling places to a census rule that would strike non-citizens from apportionment, the machinery of elections is being rebuilt around a noncitizen threat that enforcement itself must supply.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 1 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
The threatened presence of immigration agents at polling places extends the noncitizen-threat organizing principle to the ballot box itself.
The apportionment denominator itself is being rebuilt around excluding the noncitizen, the endgame of the noncitizen-centered election machinery.
The census itself is being rebuilt around noncitizen exclusion — the organizing figure of the election machinery extended to apportionment.
The universal tax return becomes the newest piece of federal machinery reorganized around the noncitizen threat, extending the citizenship-data consolidation to the IRS.
The noncitizen-voting machinery turns up no actual threat at scale, confirming that enforcement must supply the very menace the machinery is organized around.
DHS and SSA compiling state-by-state federal citizenship lists for election use is the machinery of elections being rebuilt around a federal determination of who is 'American enough' to vote.