From the Issues and Insights Editorial Board.
Eight years ago, the mainstream media told us in no uncertain terms that noncitizens don’t vote in American elections. “There is no evidence,” they said. The likely number “is zero.”
They were provably wrong then – there’d been multiple accounts of noncitizens who’d registered and voted in elections. In the years since, the evidence of this problem has piled up higher. But the media are still at it. It’s “extremely rare,” they say. It never “affects the outcome of a race.” Republicans are looking to “blame illegals” if Donald Trump loses, etc.
Here’s one example of the disconnect.
An audit of Texas voter rolls in 2019 found 95,000 noncitizens who’d registered, 58,000 of whom voted in an election. This year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he’d removed 6,500 noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls, nearly 2,000 of whom voted.
58,000 non-citizens voted in an election. That’s enough to swing an election. In 2020 Biden “defeated” Trump in Arizona by 10,457 votes (0.3%) out of 3.4 million ballots cast. The number of non-citizens who voted in Texas are more than five times the margin of Brandon’s “victory” in Arizona.
Dozens of lawmakers are pressing Attorney General Merrick Garland about what he is doing to stop noncitizens from voting. “Clearly, there is a non-negligible amount of voter participation by noncitizens in federal elections,” they say, “which is not only a serious threat to the integrity of our elections and the democratic process they represent, but also has the potential to reduce Americans’ trust and confidence in election results.”
But the Biden-Harris Justice Department appears more interested in preventing states from cleaning their voter rolls of noncitizens.
Last week, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued a statement: “With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls.”
And Democrats blocked a bill – the SAVE Act – that would have simply required some proof of citizenship in order to vote.
It’s almost as if Democrats want to let noncitizens vote.
Viriginia isn’t the only place trying to clean up its voter rolls.
The State of Florida is trying to remove noncitizens from its voter rolls. Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is fighting that effort, so Florida has gone to court:
Florida authorities on Oct. 16 sued the U.S. government, alleging that U.S. officials are illegally refusing to cooperate with Florida’s effort to remove noncitizens from its voter rolls.
State law requires state authorities to maintain accurate voter registration records. Federal law requires the federal government to respond to inquiries from federal, state, and local government agencies that are “seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual within the jurisdiction of the agency.”
But when the Florida Department of State asked U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for data on individuals whom Florida authorities identified as potentially being noncitizens who are registered to vote, USCIS’s director wrote back and said the agency could not offer any information that is not contained within the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program.
Then there are the states who fight any effort to clean up their voter rolls. Like Michigan.
Many states have been conscientious about cleaning their voter rolls — removing deceased voters, voters who have left the state, voters who are not U.S. citizens but who were registered through their driver’s license applications, and so forth.
States such as Michigan, however, have not been so fastidious, as the GAI report and the Drill Down hosts explain. “We always talk about this because this continues to be a problem in [battleground] states that are poised to matter,” says co-host Eric Eggers. “In Michigan, we’re seeing the number of counties with voter registration rates over 100 percent.”
And also Michigan:
Oregon’s Secretary of State admitted in September that the state continues to give voter registration documents to illegal aliens and that at least 1,259 were registered. Oopsie. SOS LaVonne Griffin-Valade says she’s sorry. The governor, the unfortunately-named Tina Kotek, claims it will have “no impact” on the November election.
The Heritage Foundation runs an Election Fraud Database which to date has catalogued more than 1,560 cases of proven instances of election fraud from across the country. Fraud happens everywhere in our elections. Regularly.
Back to the I&I article:
Consider these recent examples:
- Virginia’s attorney general recently announced the state moved 6,303 noncitizens from its voter rolls in 2022 and 2023.
- Arizona admitted a massive error in its voter rolls resulted in 218,000 registered voters who lacked proof of U.S. citizenship.
- A suit filed in Nevada asserts that as many as 11,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in the state and nearly 4,000 of them voted in 2020.
- An Oregon audit found nearly 1,300 noncitizens registered to vote in that state.
- Ohio’s secretary of state found nearly 600 noncitizens registered to vote.
Meanwhile, a local news investigation found mailers sent to noncitizens by their union – LIUNA – urging them to “Stop the Steal” and vote for Kamala Harris in November.
The Breitbart article goes on to talk about the five threats to election integrity:
GAI’s new report explains how those rule changes, which in many states have since been repealed or replaced, may have affected the 2020 outcome and threaten the integrity of the 2024 presidential election. The report divides the risks to our elections into five categories:
- “Dark money” such as “Zuckerbucks” that is used for public election administration.
- Lawfare operations that use taxpayer resources to “weaponize the justice system against challengers to incumbents.
- “Get Out the Vote” operations that use nonprofit status to target voters from a preferred political party.
- Vote Fraud by people who double-vote, fraudulently vote someone else’s ballot, or vote without being eligible to vote.
- Election Fraud that seeks to fix elections by illegal activities that take place during the counting or collection of ballots.
Well, a couple of weeks out from the election, here’s what’s going on.
Michigan is gearing up for a delayed announcement of election results this year, reminiscent of the 2020 scenario. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has indicated that an additional 24 hours will be required to tally all the votes.
Pennsylvania election officials – in a bid to avoid controversy in November – are telling voters ahead of time not to expect the results of the high-stakes presidential race to be ready by Election Night.
Let’s hope a toilet in Arizona doesn’t overflow and flood all the swing states again this year.