On May 8, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bill that would ban noncitizens from voting in federal elections by requiring states to collect proof of U.S. citizenship before registering voters and to purge their voter rolls of noncitizens. Our team examined media coverage of this issue in this week’s Topic of the Week. 

Each week, Ad Fontes Media chooses a widely covered trending news topic to share insight into how our analysts rank news coverage for the Media Bias Chart®. To do this, we select six articles reporting on the same story from different outlets to show how each treated the subject.

Once we choose a set of articles, pods of analysts with diverse political perspectives (one right leaning, one center, and one left leaning) read each article and use Ad Fontes Media’s content analysis methodology to determine its bias and reliability. These ratings inform the articles’ placement on that week’s special Media Bias Chart®.

Our analyst team examined several articles about the GOP bill from various media outlets last week: “US Republicans target noncitizen voting, as Trump keeps up false voter fraud claims” from Reuters, “Republican National Committee courts election conspiracy theorists to help watch polls” from the Times-Tribune, “House Republicans Heroically Tackle Imaginary Problem” from Who What Why, “Roy, Lee Introduce Bill to Require Citizenship Proof to Vote” from The Daily Signal, “House GOP eyes election safeguards to block ‘dangerously high number’ of illegal immigrants from voting” from Fox News (website), and “On election results, Republicans eagerly embrace ‘truthiness’” from the MSNBC website. The bias and reliability scores for each of these articles can be found on our Topic of the Week page.

This week’s Reuters article noted that voting by noncitizens is “already illegal and rarely occurs” and cites a third-party independent study by Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The study looked at 42 jurisdictions, accounting for 23.5 million votes in the 2016 presidential election, and found only 30 incidents of possible noncitizen voting, or 0.0001% of votes cast.

The articles in this week’s set show a strong lean toward the Republican’s argument that voting fraud by noncitizens is prolific and needs to be stopped, or the Democratic view that the data shows that this is a minor issue at best. Let’s take a closer look at articles from Who What Why and Fox News (website).

Who What Why is the operating unit of Real News Project, Inc., a global nonprofit organization composed of veteran reporters, new journalists, and experts from many fields. They are funded by individual donors and charitable organizations. Our analyst team has rated several articles from the website and have given it aggregate scores of -12.94 (strong left) for bias and 36.05 (analysis or wide variation in reliability) for reliability. This week’s article was rated at -14.67 for bias (strong left) and 31.67 for reliability (opinion or wide variation in reliability).

The subheading of this article by former congressional reporter Klaus Marre states: “Because their base believes Donald Trump’s lies about a ‘stolen election,’ House Republicans have made utterly unnecessary legislation the centerpiece of their ‘election integrity’ efforts.” Marre calls the Republican effort “stupid” because laws against noncitizens voting already exist: “the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act is not actually about election integrity but rather about pretending to address a problem that may exist in Donald Trump’s mind but not in real life… and for which penalties already exist.”

Marre reiterates the profound lack of evidence that this is a problem, and stresses that “intentionally voting illegally would be one of the dumbest crimes one could commit, which is why it happens exceedingly rarely. The penalties are extremely harsh and the upside of casting one additional vote is minuscule.” Instead, he says, this is about “reinforcing the doubts that Trump wants to sow regarding U.S. elections.”

This article has a strong left-leaning bias for its hard stance against the election deniers that are advocating for this bill. The article notes that this bill is designed to sow doubts about the outcome of the election should Trump lose again and calls it stupid and a waste of time, in so many words.

Fox News (website) posts news and information online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s the digital partner to the cable news channel with the same name. Founded in 1996, Fox News is owned by Fox News Media, part of the Fox Corporation created by Rupert Murdoch. Based on its aggregate scores from all articles rated, its average bias is 11.57 (skews right) and reliability is 35.37 (analysis or wide variation in reliability). This week’s article was rated at 14.67 for bias (strong right) and 32.67 for reliability (analysis or wide variation in reliability).

This article focuses on reiterating the statement by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in a press conference to introduce the bill. Johnson “warned that a ‘dangerously high number’ of illegal immigrants are able to vote in U.S. elections and said it could even affect who wins or loses,” and he blamed this possibility on the “wide open border” policy of the Biden administration.

The Fox article did add that “Johnson later conceded that it’s not known how many illegal immigrants or non-citizens have voted in U.S. elections, but said the bill would definitely stop any instances of it from taking place.” But it followed that with more of Johnson’s words: “‘States are not allowed right now to prove if somebody claims on that simple form that they’re a citizen, they can vote… We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable.’” A quote from a Trump administration official closes the article: “‘It is dangerous lunacy to ignore the law and allow people who are not American citizens to vote in American elections.’”

This article has a strong right-leaning bias for its almost single-minded focus on walking the GOP party line that elections can and have been tampered with, and it is critical that the government push as much as possible to make it impossible to happen in the future.

These are just two examples of the tens of thousands of articles our analysts have rated for reliability and bias. If you want a look at the larger media landscape or are curious to see how our analysts have rated your favorite sources, head on over to our website, and check out the resources we have available. And don’t forget to come back for another examination of our Topic of the Week.

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Sara Webb is a cybersecurity consultant and former high school librarian from Philadelphia, PA. She holds an M.S. in Informatics and an M. Ed in School Library and Information Technology, and has been a media literacy educator for over a decade. Sara started with Ad Fontes Media in July 2020 as a Media Analyst, and she currently continues in that role and as in-house Media Literacy Specialist. When not engrossed in media literacy projects, Sara can be found at the barn with her ex-racehorse Homer, or training her corgis for dog agility competitions.