Fact check: Did Chuck Schumer say, ‘It’s racist to only allow citizens to vote’?

Brad Sylvester, DCNF

An article shared on Facebook more than 1,000 times claims Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer once said, “It’s racist to only allow citizens to vote.”

Verdict: False

There is no evidence Schumer ever made the statement. It appears to be a distortion of an August 2017 post Schumer published on Medium.

Fact Check:

Schumer has been the subject of viral misinformation on several occasions. In this case, a viral Maga2020 News article attempts to paint him in a negative light by suggesting he said it was racist to only allow U.S. citizens to vote.

But, contrary to the article, there is no evidence the Senate minority leader ever made the statement featured in the headline. The Daily Caller News Foundation didn’t find any instance of Schumer saying these words in the congressional record, social media or public statements.

Justin Goodman, a spokesman for Schumer, confirmed in an email to the DCNF that the Senate minority leader “has not said this.”

The quote, previously debunked by PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, has been circulating online since at least 2017. It appears to distort what Schumer wrote in an Aug. 24, 2017, Medium post about President Donald Trump’s now-dissolved Election Integrity Commission, which was established in May 2017 to address “improper voter registrations, improper voting, fraudulent voter registrations, and fraudulent voting.”

In the Medium post, Schumer described the commission as an “effort to intimidate voters and purge them from the rolls through a national voter database of personal information” that disenfranchises minority voters. He also called for its dissolution and public hearings about voting rights. (Trump dissolved the commission in January 2018, citing a lack of cooperation from various states.)

Nowhere in the Medium post does Schumer make the statement attributed to him in the Maga2020 News headline, nor does he express support for the idea that noncitizens should be allowed to vote in U.S. elections.

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