Washinton: On Tuesday's episode of his YouTube show America's Mayor Live, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani boasted about the "dirty" but technically legal" voter-suppression tactic he used to keep illegal immigrants away from the polls during his 1993 campaign.

'If you come to vote, make sure you have your green card because [Immigration and Naturalisation Services] are picking up illegals,' the card read. "They went through East Harlem, which is all Hispanic. Therefore, they disseminated it throughout the Hispanic [area]," the Republican attorney explained.

Giuliani defeated incumbent David Dinkins by 53,000 votes because illegal immigrants reportedly stayed at home rather than risk being detained by immigration authorities. And that's how we kept the Hispanic vote down, he gushed. Kari Lake, the governor of Arizona, prompted him to clarify, saying that he meant "the Hispanic illegal vote."

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Attorney General Janet Reno, who was in office at the time, became aware of the mayor's questionable campaign strategy and opened an investigation into it in 1993 on the grounds that it had "violated civil rights." 

"Which civil rights did we infringe upon? They lack civil rights. During his narration of the incident, Giuliani exclaimed, "All we did was stop people who can't vote from voting. Even though we may have duped them, doing so is not illegal.

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At the time, the Justice Department released a statement informing voters that the posters put up by the Giuliani campaign accusing the INS of lurking at the polls were false. According to the statement, federal observers were there to "protect the rights of minority voters," not to verify their identification.

Dinkins, who had previously defeated Giuliani by just two percentage points in 1989, charged the winning Republican with waging "an outrageous campaign of voter intimidation and dirty tricks" after conceding, but was unable to provide any evidence of wrongdoing.

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Although the state Supreme Court overturned that law in June, about 800,000 non-citizen residents of New York City were briefly granted the right to vote in local elections last year. Democrats and Republicans continue to disagree on voter ID laws, and in June, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation that forbids local officials from enacting voting restrictions on their own.