'BradCast' 7/21/2026 ('SAVE America' Act Won't Save Trump. Neither Will False Claims of Non-Citizens Voting)

I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have. I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. Oh, look. We finally found the one real case of election fraud in the 2020 election again. I'm so scared in case I fall off my chair. And I'm wondering how I'll get down the stairs. Clouds to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. I am. From Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, this is the broadcast as heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA, and on dozens of other fine affiliate stations. On both the public airwaves and the internets around the country and the world, blanketing planet Earth. I'm Brad Friedman, your friendly investigative blogger, journalist, troublemaker, muckraker, and all around, swell fellow, says me, from bradblog.com. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to the Bradcast. We were off yesterday for a very brief Brad birthday break. Yes. Happy birthday. Thank you. So we've got a bit more than usual to try to get caught up with today. Just 105 days away now from the critical midterm elections on November 3rd, the nation's first official step in beginning to put the brakes on the runaway. Unprecedented. If otherwise, failing authoritarianism of the much despised Donald Trump and his administration. Failing or otherwise. They remain an extraordinary threat to both the nation and the world at this hour. Primary elections continue around the nation in advance of those critical November midterms with voters in the battleground state of Arizona at the polls on Tuesday. This week, all three of the top statewide elected positions in Arizona, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general currently held by Democrats in the... Grand Kenyan state, though it... narrowly swung back to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election after narrowly swinging to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Very swinging. Swingy. Hi, Desi Doyen. I haven't said hello. I've got so much to get to. That's all I can focus on. Okay. Hi. Get to it. All right. Here we go. Anyway, so in Arizona, Republicans are eager to find out if they may be able to expand the winning streak to this year's midterm elections there, particularly tar. targeting Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs in a contest considered to be one of the Republicans' best chances to flip a gubernatorial seat this year from blue to red. To that end, two congressional U.S. House members are vying for the GOP nomination with what suffices for clashing styles these days among Republicans. Congressman Andy Biggs, the former chair of the far-right so-called Freedom Caucus in the House.

who voted against upholding the 2020 presidential election results even after Donald Trump incited his own supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to steal that election. Andy Biggs has won Donald Trump's endorsement. He's facing off against Congressman David Schweikert, who currently represents a swing district in Arizona. He is, I guess, closer to what one might describe as an older school republic. not quite as maga as bigs you mean not quite as insane there you go All three Democrats in the top statewide offices, Governor, Secretary of State and AG, who each flipped their offices from red to blue back in 2022, are now running uncontested in their own respective Democratic primary. So most of the action of note at the top of the ticket on Tuesday was on the GOP side. We will, of course, share noteworthy results and or problem reports. as known on tomorrow's broadcast in a state where Trump continues to pretend that he won back in 2020 despite recounts by his own supporters, finding that he actually lost in 2020 in Arizona by more than the official results revealed. Official results at the time, by the way, put forward and signed by... Republicans. And we are also keeping our eye on Maricopa County in Arizona. That's the state's most populous and the nation's second most populous county after Los Angeles, where there is a continuing power struggle being carried out largely behind the scenes between the county election director's office, which is part of the Republican majority but not insane crazy MAGA Republican majority county board of supervisors. and the county recorder's office, which is run by a MAGA guy now, who has enlisted Stephen Miller's law firm to try and strip election powers from the board of soups, from the Republican board of soups and take it for himself in advance of the November elections. We may dig into that ugly and ternison battle in the days ahead as those inside the election director's office. where they've been overseeing elections for years, are really concerned about the attempted power grab and what it might mean for a credible election this November. If Stephen Miller's apparatchik in Arizona is able to rest control of things like voting machines and signature verification and drop box ballot pickups and election day voting and so forth, just to drop that onto your radar for now. The death toll for U.S. service members during Donald Trump's war in Iran is now up to 18.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Pentagon has also revealed, or at least claimed, that about 100 service members have been injured in attacks by Iran over the past week or so against U.S. assets in Gulf nations that are housing U.S. facilities, such as in Kuwait and Bahrain and Jim Jordan, bringing the number of casualties that the Pentagon is at least willing to admit to if you believe them at this point. during Trump's four-month-long, quote, little excursion in Iran, bringing that total to at least 500 service members at this point. That war, as we have detailed from the beginning in late February, appears to have no end in sight. With no way out for Donald Trump and, unfortunately, the world, thanks to a man-baby president who refused to listen to advisors and or fired all the good ones before launching into this deadly forever war of choice without end. And with the renewed uptick in fighting in the Gulf, new threats by Iran allies in Yemen to shut down another critical trade route for oil and natural gas out of Saudi Arabia now. And with that, oil futures have once again ticked up to above $90 a barrel on Tuesday. With gas prices here at home on the rise again along with it, more from Desi Doyen on that in our latest Green News report later this hour. Yes, indeed. Speaking of our out-of-control thirst for burning oil, massive climate change-fueled fires in Canada and parts of the U.S. continue to burn, with Republicans now hoping to fixate you on somehow blaming Canada for the fires instead of, well, themselves, among other people, and their years of climate change denial. Parts of Texas and parts of the East Coast have been facing catastrophic flooding at the same time in recent days with record temperatures across much of the country. All exacerbated thanks to climate change and fossil-fueled Republicans undermining efforts to mitigate it. And don't you worry, Trump is working around the clock to make it even worse each and every day. As we have been covering in our Green News reports for some time, at least since he returned to office last year. A new tropical storm Bertha has now formed in the Gulf, and it appears to set to be sort of scrape along the coasts of several Gulf states, bringing heavy rains and dangerous storm surge as it moves. to the west, including Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, ending up in Desi's home state of Texas. Yes, that's the current track. It's a very slow moving storm, which means a lot of rain. Be ready. And especially in Texas, which is already drenched from flooding just a week or so ago. And, of course, of all of that is not bad enough. After initially announcing, they'd identified the source of the cyclosporiasis outbreak, if that's how you say it, that has...

Made a mistake, which is one of the problems of living in a corrupt, kleptocratic authoritarian nation, Desi Doyen. Yes, and it makes me so sad and angry that something like the FDA and the CDC, which used to be world-leading, respected organizations that now Americans cannot trust them. Can trust them. And it's just, it's sad. And I feel very bad for all the public health staffers who have worked so hard to bring integrity to the job who are now gone. not mistaken, I think Taylor Farms, didn't you tell me that they had given a bunch of money to Trump or Maga or something prior to the, yeah. Wired Magazine now has a big article out today that talks about the millions of dollars, more than $3.6 million that Taylor Farms gave to conservative groups, to Donald Trump as a candidate, and to his super PACs as well. So they're friends of Donald Trump. And what do you know, a day or two after being found to be responsible for this outbreak, suddenly they are no longer responsible for some reason. Now, is it because they paid off Donald Trump like that? Who knows? But again, we certainly can't dismiss that notion knowing how corrupt he is. And this is really what is sad here. There's a third notion, another variation on that second possibility. Trump or someone close to him is hoping to manipulate the market in some way. Would he do that? Why, of course he would! While Taylor Fresh Foods Inc. is a privately held company, it's impossible to rule out the fact that Trump or's henchmen may have made some sort of investment or a bet on the prediction market regarding all of this. And Trump stands to make money from somehow, you know, buying into a damaged company after, you know, a death knell of finding by public officials. only to see that, oh, well, his announcement reversed everything. The company's in great shape, no worries at all, even after all that damage has already been done. Given what we know about this corrupt president and his family, it is impossible to rule that possibility out as well. Either way, no matter what actually happens here, the people, the American people suffer. And with all of that, What has our president been doing publicly? Well, among other things, making a jackass out of himself, hoping to glom on to stolen valor at the FIFA World Cup championship. FIFA, sorry, over the weekend and hoping to distract you from all of our ongoing nightmares by issuing what he described as a major speech late last week with major news, big, big news about the election fraud in the 2020 election. Now, I had a pretty big birthday over the weekend.

I had planned to celebrate with a day off on Monday when Trump then announced his primetime speech late last week. And given that we knew that it would be about election integrity issues or Trump pretending that it would be about that in any event, and given that so many turn to this show and to bradblog.com for information on such claims. Given our past 20 plus years of focusing, perhaps more than any other nation outlet in the nation on related issues, I considered for a second canceling our planned day off to cover his remarks. But then I heard his remarks. And as expected, they were a little more than warmed over nonsense of long ago debunked spaghetti that he's been throwing at the wall in hopes of hoaxing. you into believing that the American people really didn't reject his first failed presidency in 2020, that in fact, he, not Joe Biden, won the election despite any actual hard evidence in... What are we now? Six years later, no demonstrable evidence, none to support his false claims. Trump said some things in his speech. None of them were meaningful. Many of them, in fact, were the opposite of reality and the truth. For example, he made much to do with the fact that he was declassifying certain documents regarding the 2020 election and posting them to the White House website for all to read. After making claims, or at least pretending to make claims, that China was caught, red-handed somehow, trying to interfere in the 2020 election. In fact, the documents posted to the website declassified by Trump himself showed, in fact, that China decided against interfering in the 2020 election. And if it had, it might have done so against Joe Biden, to hurt Joe Biden. Documents declassified and posted by Trump to the White House website, however, did show that Russia intended to manipulate the election, and they did so in favor of Donald Trump. The very thing that Trump forgot to mention during his nearly 30-minute primetime speech last week, but the documents have it. It's all there. He also suggested that Venezuela somehow had interfered in the 2020 election that after his Stop the Steelers like Sidney Jerome Powell and Rudy Giuliani had made much of Hugo Chavez and Venezuelan linked election firms named Smartmatic changing votes from Trump to Biden back in 2020, frequently citing and bastardizing my own accurate at the time. exclusive reporting at bradblog.com on Venezuela and Hugo Chavez and a company named Smartmatic. In fact, by the time the 2020 rolled around, the reality is Hugo Chavez had long been dead. Whether Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Jerome Powell or Donald Trump knew that or not, and Smartmatic...

A voting machine company had just one single contract in the U.S., and that was here in Los Angeles, which even Donald Trump would not pretend he actually won in 2020, right? Well, who knows? During his remarks last week, he insinuated that either Smartmatic, he didn't mention them by name, by the way, smartly, or just asked Fox News how smart that was to not mention their name. In any event, It was either Smartmatic or as Democrats in Los Angeles somehow had stolen our own mayoral primary here to ensure that Democratic Mayor Karen Bass would have to run against a Democratic challenger. Nithya Raman this November rather than the much easier to beat Republican reality show villain Spencer Pratt. who held the second spot while the results were being counted for a time only to slip into third place after all of the votes were actually tabulated. Oh, and as to that 2020 election interference by Venezuela, you had to listen kind of closely to what Trump was actually saying, but he was referring not to the U.S. election in 2020, but to the 2020 election in Venezuela. They didn't interfere in our election. They interfered in their own election, though you had to kind of listen very closely to hear that part of his claims that once again had nothing to do with the U.S. election that year. He would go on to say right afterwards, quote, this intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past. But of course. Even Trump himself presented zero evidence of any U.S. election being hacked or a single vote being changed by any nefarious nation in the 2020 election or any other. But I was very happy to see in the mainstream media they quickly debunked much of Trump's rather pathetic and worn out misleading stuff and nonsense. So with that in mind and with Donald Trump having so far consumed far too much of my short time on this earth, we took my birthday off yesterday as planned instead. And it was delightful. Any necessary debunkage, I figured, could wait if any was even necessary by the time we returned. So there was one point in particular that I did want to hit, as right-wingers and even non-right-winger cited this number right after the speech as being alarming. Trump claimed that according to a, quote, stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. Of state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. Well, that sounds scary.

Unless you have actually covered this stuff for more than 20 years, you've heard numbers like that over and over and over again from Republicans hoping to undermine elections in hopes of passing new laws to prevent perfectly lawful voters from being able to cast a vote. Now, I will get to what that number really tells us, if anything, but late on Tuesday, the Democratic administration of New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill made an announcement that I suspect, well, I suspect it'll be leading all of the right-wing news outlets on Tuesday night. As the New York Times reported, roughly 400 non-citizens voted. In New Jersey, after about 6,600 residents were improperly registered to vote between June of 2023 and June of 2024 because of a software error at the Department of Motor Vehicles. All the people affected had disclosed that they were not citizens when registering for either a driver's license or an ID, but they were nonetheless placed on the voter rolls in error. Thanks to the software. According to the governor, in a statement, quote, these individuals answered no when they were asked on a keypad, whether they were a U.S. citizen when they applied for a driver's license or ID card, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them to vote anyway. All 6,600 people, she said, will, of course, be removed from the rolls. Cheryl, a Democrat who took over in January this year held a news conference to disclose the error tied to a software vendor that is being phased out in New Jersey. State officials became aware of the error just last week and began an immediate investigation into what happened. The governor said that she was, quote, appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen. Now, 400 non-citizen voters sounds bad, especially when Trump's claim of, you know, despite his claim of 280,000 on the voting rolls, even if that number is true, which it likely is not for reasons I'll get to, you will find a handful, maybe a dozen non-citizen voters in most states. When Republicans try to dig deep to look, and most of those handful or a dozen usually cast their votes by mistake, not realizing that they're not legally allowed to vote. As noted, I'll get to more than that in a second. But even if we take the numbers from Governor Cheryl today in New Jersey, 400 non-citizens who voted after accidentally being registered in New Jersey before the 2024 election, after telling officials they were not U.S. citizens. Well, New Jersey's population is about 9.4 million in 2026. So based on recent population, 400 votes is about 0.0043% of 9.4 million.

Okay, but Brad, the voting age population is smaller than the full population. So those 18 and older in New Jersey, how many is that? Well, that's 7.4 million, which means that a 400 non-citizens voted in the Garden State in 2024, that would be 0.0054% of the voting age population. Yes, Brad, but everyone who is registered to vote doesn't necessarily vote. Everyone of voting age doesn't turn out every time, but in, okay, fair enough, in 2024, about 4.3 million of them did in the presidential race. That means the 400 non-citizen voters in New Jersey in the 2024 presidential election. Well, that amounted to... 0.0093% of the ballots cast. Sounds bad, right? I've covered elections and election integrity for more than 20 years. 400 non-citizens casting a vote in a presidential election in a single state is a huge number. It blows away any numbers that I've ever seen from even the most aggressive Republican attempts to prove massive fraud by non-citizens coming into this country. Apparently, because they want to give up their universal health care in their own nations to come here and steal our elections or something. But even that huge number of 400 votes amounts to 0.0093% of the votes cast, and if accurate, it is by far the worst such incident I've seen of or heard of in 20 years of coverage. Nonetheless, you can expect that the wingnuts will run with that number and that 278,000 that Trump claimed were on the voting rolls in the U.S. according to his DHS. How many of those people actually voted if they even exist? Well, neither he nor the White House nor DHS seems to have mentioned it, which should tell you something right there. But where did they come up with that number? And who are these supposed non-citizens on the voting rolls? Let's take a quick break and we'll come back to discuss exactly that. Plus, Desi Doyen and the Green News Report to make it all better somehow. All of that. Still ahead on today's Bradcast, I'm Brad Friedman.

The Bradcast and the Green News Report are 100% independent, 100% listener supported. But we can't do it alone. We need you. Please help us bring real facts to listeners at independent stations around the nation. Please drop by bradblog.com slash donate. That's bradblog.com slash donate. And thanks. What kind of fool am I? Dude, it's only an hour long show. Welcome back to the Brad, and I got to get to Desi Doyan in The Green News Report. Welcome back to the broadcast, Brad Friedman from bradblog.com. All right, some Senate right-wangers allied with Donald Trump said that they're open to attaching the president's top legislative priority, according to the Hill, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. Now, it actually was called the Save Act, but Trump calls it the Save America Act. Which would actually translate to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility America Act. Anyway, some of them are willing to attach this measure to a stopgap measure funding the government past September 30, a continuing resolution. But the idea is getting a lot of pushback, according to the Hill, from some Republican colleagues who worry that it will lead to another government shutdown. This one coming just before or even during the critical November midterm elections, which is probably not a good look for the party that controls both. both houses of Congress and the White House, even as their president claims that Democrats are stealing all the elections, which, if true, means that Democrats are actually apparently pretty really bad at it. Oddly, whenever Democrats are in charge of the federal government apparatus, like in 2016, Donald Trump wins the election. When he was in charge of the government, he lost the election, only to win the next one once Democrats were back in charge. You're welcome Donald Trump. Weird, ain't it? But sure, Democrats are stealing elections and apparently doing it with the help of an army of non-citizens who are not eligible to vote. Trump ratcheted up pressure on Senate and House Republicans over the weekend to make another last-ditch attempt to pass the elections legislation. The Hill reports that would force people to show documentary proof of citizenship, which tens of millions of Americans do not have easy access to. And even if they do,

Well, it can cause all kinds of difficulty for women in particular who have been married at some point since they were born and may have changed their name. Good luck. Of course, you need to know up front, since not enough people are making this point clear. Donald Trump does not really care if this measure passes. He likely knows that it will not pass. Because it doesn't even have enough votes among his own party in the U.S. Senate, even if they did do away with the filibuster somehow. And people need to know that what he's really looking for is an excuse to avoid responsibility when and if his party takes their expected shalacking this November because Americans hate him and they hate the Republican policies that he has helped put in place so much. Nonetheless, in pretending to want to pass this legislation during Trump's prime time remarks from the White House late last week, he made this claim to back up his pretend argument for passage of the SAVE Act. To reveal just how vulnerable elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the DHS review, state voter rolls, and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. These disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible. A stunning investigation. You heard him. 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in federal elections. Okay? If true, big if if there. But if true, how many of them actually voted in a federal election? If they found the people, it's very easy to tell if those people actually voted. But Donald Trump did not say, which should pretty much tell you just about everything here. Because if it was any sort of substantive number of non-citizens actually voting in an election, you can bet that would have been at the beginning of that speech, not buried near the end. But of course, you'll hear Republicans say that if one non-citizen voted, that's too many. And that is, well, true. But if the solution to prevent that from happening, to prevent them from voting that one non-citizen, what it means is that thousands, if not millions of lawful voters will lose their right to vote to stop that one non-citizen voters, is that defensible?

Given that that's what would happen if Congress passed Trump's Save Act to mandate documentary proof of citizenship for voters. That's exactly what Trump would seem to be calling for. He doesn't care how many lawful citizens lose their right to vote as long as you stop that one or that six or even 400 in New Jersey. Are Republicans okay with that? But what are the army of non-citizens that Republicans enjoy telling you Democrats are bringing in from other countries to vote unlawfully without detection, apparently, to vote in American elections, even though it means if they get caught, they would be immediately deported? Well, actually, they would be thrown in jail for some period of time and then deported. Well, Reuters did an excellent deep dive into some of this over the weekend. I want to share a bit of it with you. I will link to the full analysis when posting today's show at bradblog.com. But as Reuters reports, according to Donald Trump, America is a hotbed of voting fraud with foreigners and being the major culprits here. He has portrayed non-citizen voting as part of a broad Democratic conspiracy to dilute Republican power. He has claimed on social media that, quote, crazed Democrats allow unvetted migrants to enter the U.S., quote, so they can vote, vote, vote. He's called for elections to be nationalized due to the danger of non-citizens casting ballots, and he has described illegal voting by non-citizens as so widespread that, quote, cheating is rampant in our elections, unquote. Now, however, a new Reuters analysis of federal court data undercuts Trump's assertions that a conspiracy of non-citizen voting is afoot in America. Case records show that federal prosecutors have charged just 129 people under the federal voting by aliens statute created by Congress in 1996, so 129. charged in the 30 years since the law's passage, including during two terms by eight years by George W. Bush, whose Department of Justice spent years attempting to ferret out voter fraud. And, of course, one plus terms of Donald Trump, 129 in 30 years. That's all they could find. Of those 129, more than two-thirds of those prosecutions, 86, have been filed during Trump's five and a half years in office. And none of the cases, even under Trump, did prosecutors allege a coordinated effort to influence an election, either by a foreign country, by the immigrants themselves, by Democrats, or anyone else. And no defendant was accused of being paid to vote.

as Trump and his Trumpers also like to claim. Instead, many appear to stem from voter confusion, miscommunication with election officials or administrative errors, such as the story that I mentioned before the break today, out of New Jersey on Tuesday, the administrative errors, the software errors. So to give you an example, one of the people that was swept up in Trump's crackdown, is a woman named Dora Demada Rodriguez, the 72-year-old Panama-born grandmother, had lived in the U.S. for decades before casting a ballot in the 2016 election. She told Reuters she hoped her vote would make life better for her four children and 15 grandchildren, all of whom are U.S. citizens. Quote, I wasn't sneaking in, she later told a judge, according to a transcript. I believe I was doing it by the law, she said. Well, she wasn't. Demada, who entered the U.S. legally in 1973 with her American husband, she was convicted in North Carolina federal court back in 2019 of illegal voting in the 2016 election. She spent 13 days in jail. She was told by immigration authorities that the matter was then settled. But it wasn't. Last year, the Trump administration revisited her case. After living here lawfully for 40 years, she was deported to Panama in June. DeMata told the federal judge that she had registered to vote at the local elections office using a driver's license, which state officials told Reuters carried a designation for non-citizens. She assumed election workers knew that she wasn't a citizen and took their acceptance of her voter registration application as proof that she could legally vote. Quote, I was very happy because I'm very patriotic even though I'm not an American. She traces the error to September 2016 that month. She registered to vote in North Carolina after watching an online video that she interpreted as saying that immigrants could legally vote. Two years later, she was arrested after North Carolina officials auditing voter roles identified her as a non-citizen. As I said, it's easy to do when you look at the voting rolls. If you find someone who's a non-citizen, you can see if they voted or not. It's public information. She was sentenced in 2019 after she pleaded guilty. She spent nearly two weeks in jail. She faced a $500 fine at sentencing. She maintained that she believed that she was eligible to vote when she voted.

The case then in any event appeared closed, and then in December of last year, 2025, immigration authorities detained Damada during a passport check at Houston's airport as she prepared to fly to Europe on vacation. After pulling up her 2019 conviction for non-citizen voting, they put her in detention and they began deportation proceedings immediately as part of Trump's immigration crackdown. In response to questions about Domada's case, Homeland Security said that she was a, quote, criminal illegal alien who entered the U.S. illegally through Mexico in 2009. In fact, court records from her 2019 voting case revealed that she was a lawful permanent resident. Her lawyer told the court that she had been living legally in the U.S. for more than four decades at the time. An image of her green card shared with Reuters showed that she obtained permanent resident status in 1973 as the spouse of a U.S. citizen. Her case is one of 73 convictions or guilty pleas in the... Federal non-citizen voting cases since 1996, identified by Reuters, among the 62 defendants whose immigration status could be determined, 49 of them were lawful permanent residents like her, many of whom, yes, believed that they were allowed to vote as green card holding lawful permanent residents. Others who end up on the roles, the vast majority are usually placed there through those administrative errors we mentioned, no fault of the person, often unknown to them that they were even registered to vote. And they never cast a vote. Calling on Congress to pass the Save America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast a ballot, which is already required for registering to vote in all 50 states under existing federal law. You have to show an ID. Trump said on July 3rd that the bill would ensure Republicans, quote, will not lose an election for 100 years. Eight election officials and voting rights experts told Reuters that Trump's focus on non-citizen voting fuels unfounded fears of fraud. June report by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice estimated that even a modest error rate in a nationwide citizenship check could result in tens of thousands of lawful voters being mistakenly identified as non-citizens. In fact, the federal database that Trump is demanding all states now used to run their voting rolls through.

To determine if they include non-citizens on the rolls, well, that database itself is notorious for reporting false positives. People that might once have been non-citizens, for example, but have become naturalized. And this crappy database that Trump uses is not kept up to date might identify those people as non-citizens when they're actually citizens. We've covered story after story in recent months on this show of Republican-led states who have cooperated with this scheme. They've run their list through the database. They were told that there were hundreds or thousands of non-citizens on their roles, only to investigate them and find 06. or two or zero non-citizens on the rolls who ever cast a ballot. Quote, the administration is using a sledgehammer to address this issue, unquote, said Pam Anderson, the Republican nominee for Colorado Secretary of State back in 2022. She's a former election official who served as president of the Statewide County Clerks Association. And yes, again, she is a Republican. She said she had, quote, grave concerns that this will have a depressive effect on turnout. Election officials from both parties say non-citizen voting happens, but they add that it's on a scale so small it has no significant impact on election results. Quote, all evidence suggests that it occurs extremely infrequently, said Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania's top election official and a Republican. He cited his 15 years of experience in local and state elections in the Battleground Keystone State. Among the 73 people that were convicted or pleaded guilty to the federal charge of voting by aliens out of the 129 charged since the law was adopted 30 years ago in 1996, 40 of them believed they had a legal right to vote according to the court records and to interviews. 32 of those said that they had been signed up to vote by mistake or were encouraged to register or reassured by election officials that they were eligible to do so. Eight said they believed permanent residents could vote or took their successful registration as proof that they could vote. Party affiliation could be established for 34 of the defendants. Eleven were Democrats, nine were Republicans. Fourteen had no party affiliation. The small numbers and mixed affiliations suggest the cases were not part of any coordinated effort to benefit a single party, or as Donald Trump said, to vote, vote, vote.

49 were lawful permanent residents. 13 were living in the U.S. illegally. Immigration status could not be determined for the remaining 11 cases. In a letter to a judge disclosed in court, one non-citizen voter explained why he trusted the advice from a clerk at a state motor vehicle licensing office and registered to vote. He said, quote, the clerk told me that because my wife was an American citizen, I could register to vote. I believed that she should know the rules because she worked there and she approved me. So I trusted her words and signed the form. And then later, I received the registered voter card. Another testified that a canvasser urged her to register, even after she disclosed that she was not a citizen, suggesting that it could help her path to naturalization. At least three said in legal documents that they used government-issued ID when they registered to vote and were never told that they were ineligible. They later cast ballots in federal elections and then they were penalized years later. Of the 129 federal prosecutions under the Voting by Aliens statute, Reuters found the charge was dismissed in 30 of those cases, remains pending in just 26. Despite all of the resources the Trump administration has put into this and the ease of catching people who are unlawfully registered to vote, casting a vote, if you really want to. And for the record. The now deported 72-year-old Panamanian grandmother, Donna Adora Damada Rodriguez, who lived in the U.S. legally for 40 years with a green card, married to a U.S. citizen with 15 grandchildren before she was then deported to Panama. For the record, when she voted unlawfully in North Carolina in 2016, she voted for Donald Trump. The Reuters story shows a photo of her carrying a huge Trump flag. Donald Trump does not care about non-citizen voting. He's not dumb enough to think that stopping them will somehow keep Republicans in power for 100 years. He knows it's not about stopping non-citizens from voting. It's about preventing lawful democratic voters from being able to cast their lawful votes. More importantly, he needs an excuse for what is likely to happen to him and his party come November. If there is anything that we have learned from Donald Trump from 2020, it's that Trump cannot allow himself to be seen as a loser. Demanding passage of a law that he knows cannot be passed by his own party in Congress. And that wouldn't be even logistically possible to even implement before the 2026 general election for which ballots will be going out now in about 60 days to absentee and overseas voters. He knows that this is nothing less than building his excuse in advance for losing the next election. Because he's a loser. But he's...

Desperately hoping that you don't notice. And that's true, even if he has to take American democracy down with him in the bargain. He does not care. Hopefully, you do. And we'll vote accordingly in November. Green News is next. I'm Brad Friedman. Hey, this is Brad. Here at the Bradcast and Bradblog.com, we fight for election integrity all year around, like no other media outlet in the nation. But, of course, we need your help to help us remain on your public airwaves and completely independent. Please help us continue that fight over your public airwaves by stopping by Bradblog.com slash donate. And thanks. Okay, Desidoyan, you're ready to take us home here? Yes. Another slow weekend in the Green News world, I assume. Golly, I wish that were true. Let's find out in our latest Green News report. Attacks by both the U.S. and Iran have been escalating past military infrastructure to actual civilian infrastructure. U.S. and Iran target vital civilian drinking water facilities. We're in the midst. One of the most significant economic upheavals and generations. Public backlash rises against resource-hungry data centers. Plus, Carney and Ford say that we should help when they could have avoided this problem. Supergenious Republicans call for punishing Canada over climate-intensified wildfire smoke. All of those supergenuces and more straight ahead from brandblog.com. I'm Brad Friedman. And I'm Tessie Doyen. Stand by for six minutes of independent green news. Politics. analysis and snarky comment. I told them, I mean, you've got to stop these fires from coming in and, you know, poisoning our air. Our air has been poisoned. I've never remembered this happening. Over the last four or five years you saw it starting to take place, I've never remembered it happening. And I wonder why that is, President Jackass. This is your Green News Report.

Okay, Desi Doyen, I'm sorry I didn't mean to call Donald Trump President Jackass. But we're on FCC radio, so that's about as strong as I could go. Yes, I understand. Yeah. What do you got for us today? Well, first, Tropical Storm Bertha has formed in the Gulf of Mexico. It is the second-named storm of the season, but it is unlikely to reach hurricane status. Wherever it goes, we'll see heavy rain. Meanwhile, the Iran War has escalated again with missile strikes on civilian infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, which can be considered a war crime. U.S. missiles have damaged or destroyed civilian bridges, water infrastructure, and desalination facilities after Trump publicly threatened to do so. Kuwait says Iran damaged their power generation and water desalination plants. With the strait of Hormuz still disrupted, Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis on Monday announced a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea, the other major Middle East oil. export route. That has been a critical alternative for shipping oil and gas. It's all going very, very well. Oil industry experts warn that commercial oil inventories are now at their lowest levels in recent history as the Iran War squeezes global energy supplies. If shipments of oil and gas don't increase soon through the Strait of Formuz, they say the world has limited capacity to withstand a longer-term supply shock. the U.S., gas prices have jumped back up to an average of $4 a gallon, again driving up inflation. The Financial Times reports that Donald Trump failed to carry out his promise last year to refill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve back before he attacked Iran when oil prices were still cheap. Various outlets estimate the SPR has about six weeks of crude oil supply left, the lowest inventory. in 45 years. Oh, this will be fun. In other news, New York and New Jersey battled torrential rains and flash flooding that inundated roads and subway stations over the weekend, plus toxic wildfire smoke, but it all cleared up just in time for the World Cup final. And because we live in the stupidest timeline, Republican lawmakers have called for punishing Canada over the pall of wildfire smoke that has blanketed the Northeast, even though fires in Minnesota are also contributing. Canada's Prime Minister responded that the U.S. needs to take greater responsibility for fighting climate change. Yep. Studies show that we are seeing a dramatic increase in wildfires across North America as higher temperatures and drought conditions driven by man-made climate change extend the summer fire season. Climate scientists warn that as long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, global temperatures will rise, droughts will worsen, and we will see bigger, more frequent wildfires and smoke events. Even Donald Trump admitted it. You heard at the top saying, I don't remember seeing this.

three or four years ago. That's right, President Jackass. Oh, did I say that already? Finally, public backlash is surging against energy and water-hungry data centers. The N.A.C. has sued Elon Musk's massive X-A-I data center in Mississippi, alleging it is illegally operating an unpermitted power plant with 27 gas turbines spewing toxic air pollution into black communities already suffering. from disproportionately high rates of respiratory illness. Cheyenne Wyoming banned a controversial metadata center from the city water system after it dumped bacteria-contaminated wastewater into the system requiring months of costly cleanup. And in New York, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has implemented a year-long moratorium on approvals for new hyperscale data centers in order to develop new regulations on energy use. Preempt state lawmakers broader ban on new data centers. The governor cited soaring electricity bills. We'll take what we can get for the moment for much more on all of those stories and the ones we couldn't get to today. Check out our website at greennews.bradblog.com. I'm Bradfredman. And I'm Desi Doyen. And this has been your Green News Report.

By the way, as we're going to air here, be careful out there. Some 32 million people right now in America are said to be under... tornado watches on Tuesday with severe thunderstorms in the northeast and Ohio Valley. Yes, there's a lot of volatile weather out there. It is the time of extreme weather storms, wildfires, flooding, be ready, be prepared, pay attention to what's happening nearby. It's bad out there. Desi Doyen is our producer. Thank you very much. Desi Doyen. Thanks to all of you for spending a portion of your day or night with us. If you missed any portion of today's show, want to give it another listen, want to share it with someone you know or love or hate you. could do so. at bradblog.com for free where we rely on those of you who hit a donate button to help us stay on your public airwaves. My thanks to those who have swung by and dropped a birthday gift into the tip jar. Greatly appreciate it all and, of course, very much needed. Drop me email if you like. I am Bradcast at Bradblog.com. On the social media is I am the Bradblog. Desi Doyen is Green News Report. We'll see you there. Until we see you here next time, I'm Brad Friedman. Good luck, world. Race towards an unbrain. Don't be afraid to care.