by Natalia Mittelstadt
Non-U.S. citizens have been added to voter registrations in several states primarily through motor vehicle departments, sometimes even after explaining that they are not U.S. citizens.
States have been discovering noncitizens on their rolls for years, and many were added through the “driver voter” process at state motor vehicle departments that began with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). If noncitizens are seeking citizenship, registering to vote illegally can prevent that from happening.
The election integrity group has been examining state voter registrations for years and has found that across the country, many noncitizens are illegally registered to vote.
Pennsylvania
J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), said at a press conference: Only news A special report from The Association of Mature American Citizens to air Tuesday reveals that non-citizens in Pennsylvania have been registering to vote for decades.
“Pennsylvania registered noncitizens, they admitted — this wasn’t some conspiracy on the internet — and they admitted that they had registered noncitizens for 20 years with PennDOT, and that was a glitch, as they called it,” Adams said. “So we use the National Voter Registration Act to try to get records of how bad the problem was, records of how they solved the problem or supposedly solved it, and they’ve been blocking us for about seven years.”
He explained that PILF had oral arguments earlier this month before the “Third Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, defending our victory. Hopefully, Pennsylvania will eventually expunge the record.”
In 2017, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican who was then a Philadelphia city commissioner, told a Pennsylvania Senate committee that more than 100,000 matches were found between voter registration data and state driver’s license numbers and Immigration and Naturalization Service metrics.
The matches don’t mean all of those people were registered to vote, but Schmidt he argued: “We’re not talking about an insignificant number here. We’re talking about a potentially very significant number in the thousands and tens of thousands.”
Pennsylvania Department of State announced in September 2017 Records show that since 1972, 1,160 non-citizens have requested to cancel their voter registration.
California
Meanwhile in California PILF filed a federal lawsuit in February against the Alameda County Registrar of Voters for allegedly violating the NVRA by failing to disclose the information of non-citizens who had registered to vote and had voted for more than 20 years.
Adams also noted that foreigners were added to the voter rolls through state departments of communication if they lied about their citizenship.
“[W]”We’ve collected data for years on how foreigners get into the country, and it’s largely because they’re not being truthful in the voting process in the system. And that includes people who are here on green cards, people who are here legally,” Adams added.
“The majority of people who register to vote, according to the data we collect, are actual legal residents, about 90% of them, 95%. And so they get caught up in the system, through drive-thru voters, through the DMV, and they register to vote that way, and that’s a big problem,” he continued.
However, it is not uncommon for non-citizens of a given state to still appear on the voter rolls despite providing evidence of their citizenship status.
“People register to vote when they tell election officials on their voter registration form that they are not citizens,” Adams said.
“We have hundreds of people who mark on the form, ‘hello, I am not a citizen,’ and yet they register to vote,” he explained.
PILF obtained voter registration forms from New Jersey and San Diego counties in California, showing that non-U.S. citizens declared they did not have U.S. citizenship but were nonetheless registered to vote.
Lauren Bis, Director of Communications and Engagement at PILF, he said Only news In February, most non-citizen voters self-reported that they cast a ballot because they are required to do so as part of the naturalization process required to become U.S. citizens.
The second most common way for non-citizens to register to vote is Third-party registration drives by nonprofit organizations, Adams previously said,Only news, no noiseTelevision programme.
While non-citizens are voting ban in federal, state and most local elections, in municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont and in Washington, allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.
This year, thousands of non-resident voters have been discovered on the rolls. Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, North Dakota and Ohio have included a provision in their state constitutions that says, prohibits non-citizens from votingMeanwhile, Iowa, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin are holding ballots where voters can decide in the November general election whether non-citizens should be barred from voting in state elections.
Arizona
On Tuesday, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) announced that nearly 100,000 voters participated in the vote. incorrectly registered in this state as proof of U.S. citizenship, even though they did not.
Fontes explained that there was an error in the state’s systems that caused about 97,000 voters to be flagged as having provided documented proof of U.S. citizenship, Votebeat reportedThe Department of Motor Vehicles provides driver’s license information to the state’s voter registration system, and the error occurred in that process. The affected voters obtained Arizona driver’s licenses before October 1996 and were issued duplicates before registering to vote after 2004, Fontes said.
The error has persisted for about 20 years and four administrations, he noted, and was discovered by a Maricopa County employee who found a registered voter who had not provided proof of U.S. citizenship but was listed as a voter who could vote in both federal and state elections. The voter had a green card but had never cast a ballot, Fontes said.
Texas
Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced that more than 1 million ineligible voters were removed from voter rolls as of 2021. Of those, more than 6,500 noncitizens were found, and about 1,930 of them voted. The records of those 1,930 voters are currently being transferred from the Secretary of State’s Office to the Attorney General’s Office for investigation.
ohio
In May, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) directed All 88 counties have begun the process of removing noncitizens from Ohio voter registrations after a review by the Division of Public Integrity and his office’s Office of Data Analysis and Archives. The review analyzed data from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and found 137 noncitizen voter registrations that twice verified they were not U.S. citizens.
In August, LaRose ordered county election officials to remove another 499 non-citizens registered to vote on a given state’s voter rolls.
Illinois and elsewhere
According to the May 2023 PILF report Chicago Records shows that since 2007, 394 foreign citizens have been removed from the city’s electoral registers, with 20 of them casting 85 votes.
In April 2023 PILF reported Maricopa County, Arizona, records show that 222 foreign citizens have been removed from the county’s voter rolls since 2015, with nine of them casting 12 votes in four federal elections.
According to February data report According to PILF, Pima County has removed 186 noncitizens from its voter rolls since 2021, with most of them registering to vote through third parties.
Of the 186 non-resident voters in Pima County, seven cast ballots in the two federal and local elections. A total of 120 entries, or about 65 percent, “came from ‘political parties and group actions,’” according to information provided to PILF by Pima County. The county data did not include which external drives noncitizens had registered.
The highest number of non-resident voter registrations in Pima County occurred in 2022, with 132. The 2022 special election year also saw the highest number of non-resident voters cast ballots in the county, with a total of six in the general election.
Other PILF Report noted that before the 2014 midterm elections, North Carolina discovered that 1,454 people on the state’s voter rolls were not naturalized U.S. citizens. Of those, 89 registered people showed up at the polls, 24 of those were challenged, and 11 of those were upheld.
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Natalia Mittelstadt is a reporter at Just the News.
Photo “Illegal Border Crossers” by US Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens.
