On the issue of illegals casting a legal ballot, Heritage Foundation voting expert Hans von Spakovsky says state oversight deserves some blame for non-citizen voting, a problem that was in place before Biden took office.
Government-run National Public Radio called voter registration for illegals an accident in 2019 and called the voting of illegals a myth just two months ago.
NPR is half right.
“The problem is states aren't doing very much to verify citizenship, so it's extremely easy for someone who's not a citizen to register to vote and to vote in elections,” von Spakovsky told the Washington Watch program. “When it’s discovered, oftentimes nothing is done about it.”
When the subject of illegals voting is covered by traditional media, it’s often disregarded as a minor occurrence such as:
This from The Washington Post.
This from The Associated Press.
Or in the case of The New York Times, it’s outright supported. "There is no good reason you should have to be a citizen to vote," reads the headline of a 2021 op-ed.
While media coverage often notes rare occurrences of illegals voting in past elections, news outlets fail to connect the dots to the increased number of illegals in the country for the 2024 election.
Fifteenth Amendment covers U.S. citizens
Most states have some form of voter registration assistance when individuals interact with government agencies. Contact with a given state’s Department of Motor Vehicles is a fairly common method for voter registration. Even states that do not have automatic voter registration laws may offer the service.
The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right of citizens to vote.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation released a report in 2018 that found noncitizens were often invited and given access to ballots in 13 sanctuary cities across seven states – for 10 years prior to the release of the report.
Von Spakovsky doesn’t expect the trend to be reversed in 2024.
“Oh, I have no confidence in that at all,” he said.
Von Spakovsky said Republicans are trying to put in place statutes and provisions that would ensure that only U.S. citizens – those of any heritage or ethnicity – are allowed to register and vote.
It’s widely assumed that illegals will cast ballots for Democrat candidates. In their resistance to additional oversight, it’s Democrats who are trampling on voter rights, von Spakovsky said.
“It doesn’t matter which political party they support, every time an alien illegally votes that alien is negating the vote of a citizen. Democrats don’t seem to want to understand that or just basically ignore it,” von Spakovsky said.
The ineligible voter registrations were typically discovered only after illegals self-reported their status to officials.
The PILF contends that the National Voter Registration Act – also known as Motor Voter – which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993, is the primary problem in the ease with which illegals become registered voters.
“A state’s implementation of the National Voter Registration Act invited noncitizens to participate in voting and relied on those same individuals to self-report their actions at their own peril, wrote PILF in its news release.
Republicans drawing attention to the problem of illegals voting, in light of the open border and the election integrity concerns of 2020, are often accused of trying to trample on rights.
Von Spakovsky was part of a House committee hearing on the issue last week.
House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the SAVE Act last week – Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. It would ban aliens from voting and would require proof of citizenship in the form of photo ID or a birth certificate.
Dems accuse GOP of voter suppression
“The Democratic witnesses, the Democratic members of the committee, basically wanted to say, ‘This isn't a problem. It just doesn't happen at all, and the whole intent of even talking about it is to try to come up with measures that will suppress votes,’” von Spakovsky said.
Von Spakovsky has seen lax state oversight lead to illegals at the polls.
“I actually was on a county election board in Virginia more than a decade ago. We discovered almost 300 aliens who are on our voter rolls. We removed them, but about half of them had already cast ballots. We sent it both to the local DA and to the U. S. Justice Department, and as you can probably imagine, neither did anything about it,” he said.
