Always beware the Why not? argument — especially when it comes to erecting barriers to voting in elections. In that case, the pertinent question should always be, Why?

There’s no good answer to the latter question regarding federal and Missouri state legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Both the federal Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act pending in Congress, and similar state legislation pending in Missouri, would require voters to provide a birth certificate, passport or other documentation of citizenship when registering. At this writing, prospects appear slim for passage of either. Good.

But given that this voter-suppression-and-disinformation scheme in sheep’s clothing keeps stalking our politics these days, it’s worth reviewing why these proposals aren’t the harmless, commonsense measures their supporters claim them to be.

First, the entire stated motivation for these proposed restrictions is based on the fictional premise that noncitizens are illegally infiltrating and impacting American elections. They’re not, and there’s absolutely zero evidence to the contrary.

Study after study has found illegal noncitizen voting to be something that almost never happens. What does “almost” mean? A Brennan Center analysis of 42 jurisdictions during the 2016 election found that alleged noncitizen voting was investigated (not necessarily proven) in just 30 instances, out of more than 23 million total votes cast.

Even the Heritage Foundation, one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies and staunch backer of his false claims of rampant noncitizen voting, can’t come up with evidence. Heritage created a database of what it claims are cases of illegal voting in elections going all the way back to the 1980s — and over all those years found just 68 instances of alleged noncitizen voting.

Trump himself, early in his first term, appointed loyalists to his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to great fanfare, seeking to prove that massive illegal immigrant voting had skewed the 2016 popular vote against him. His commission was quietly disbanded just months later, after finding exactly nothing.

These conclusions jibe with common sense. Noncitizen voting is a violation of both state and federal law. Voters already must sign a statement confirming their citizenship when registering to vote, under penalty of perjury.

Your average undocumented immigrant, already highly incentivized to keep his head down, is really going to risk drawing that kind of law-enforcement scrutiny for the sake of casting … one vote? That makes no sense. Which explains why there’s no evidence that it ever happens outside the tiniest of margins.

Still, some will say: Why not? Why not just require citizenship proof anyway, just to be safe? What can it hurt?

It actually can hurt the millions of Americans who don’t have ready access to proof of their citizenship — more than 20 million, according to another Brennan Center analysis.

The two most common documents for citizenship proof would be passports and birth certificates. Lower-income Americans are far less likely to have passports — which, given the reality of racial economic disparity in America, effectively means minorities are less likely to have them.

As for birth certificates, what about women who have changed their names upon marriage? The League of Women Voters estimates almost 70 million American women could have difficulty presenting qualifying paperwork reflecting their current names.

To these solid, familiar answers to the question of Why not?, we would add one that doesn’t get enough discussion: This entire project is in service to legitimizing the big lie of rampant noncitizen voting that Trump has been bellowing for a decade now. And it mustn't be legitimized.

Whether it's to assuage his ego regarding a 2020 reelection loss he still refuses to acknowledge, or to skew the coming midterms (or at least lay groundwork to challenge potential Democratic gains), massive noncitizen voting remains an article of faith to this president.

Federal and state laws endorsing this delusion aren't the same as evidence, but to Trump's bottomless id, it would certainly feel like validation. All indications are that's the only reason Congress, the Missouri Legislature and other jurisdictions are engaged in this massive snipe hunt.

Passing laws to address a problem that doesn’t actually exist outside this president’s alternate reality may serve him, but it doesn’t serve Missourians or other Americans — and it certainly doesn’t serve democracy.

That’s why not.

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