Americans deserve to have an electoral process that they can trust and that protects this most sacred right.
Americans deserve to have an electoral process that they can trust and that protects this most sacred right.
W ith Election Day less than a month away, the respected Gallup polling organization has some sobering news. Only 57 percent of Americans are very or somewhat confident that their votes this year will be accurately cast and counted. The percentage who say they are “not at all confident” in the vote is now 19 percent. As recently as 2008, that number was only 6 percent.
While there is a clear partisan breakdown in the responses, concerns about election integrity are nonetheless widespread. Seventy-four percent of Republicans, 47 percent of independents, and 21 percent of Democrats tell Gallup that “people using illegal or fraudulent means to cast invalid votes will be a problem.”
Despite such findings, the mainstream media seem intent on dismissing or explaining away evidence that doesn’t fit the pre-approved “move along, nothing to see here” narrative. They falsely insist that there are no vulnerabilities in our election process.
The Supreme Court disagrees. It has consistently recognized not only that the government has an interest in preventing voter fraud but also that it must ensure that citizens have confidence in the integrity of elections: In a 2006 decision over an Arizona voter-ID requirement, it unanimously held that the state had an interest in preventing people from perceiving the system as corrupt, losing faith in the process, and ending their participation.
And the Supreme Court is not alone in observing that voting fraud can sap voter confidence. A bipartisan commission chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James Baker concluded in 2005 that “the perception of possible fraud contributes to low confidence in the system,” regardless of the amount of fraud that actually occurs. It recommended a system of voter identification and a cleanup of the states’ egregiously outdated and inaccurate voter-registration rolls.
Polls show that many Americans worry about noncitizens casting ballots, especially given efforts in cities from New York to San Francisco to make it legal for noncitizens to vote in local elections. In practice, nothing prevents a noncitizen from registering to vote and actually voting other than a box on a form that asks for citizenship status but is never verified. That’s why voters in five states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Alabama, and North Dakota — have passed laws to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The issue of noncitizen voting is before voters in eight more states this November.
In August, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin removed 6,303 noncitizens from the voter rolls who had “accidentally or maliciously attempted to register” to vote. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has announced that over 1 million people have been removed from the state’s voter rolls, including people who moved out of state, are deceased, or are otherwise ineligible. Some 6,500 were potential noncitizens, including 1,930 who had a history of voting. Attorney General Ken Paxton is conducting an investigation into whether organizations were purposely registering noncitizens to vote. Secretaries of state in Ohio and Montana are suing the Biden administration, accusing officials of encouraging noncitizens to vote.
The issue is sure to come to the fore this November if the election is close enough. In 2014, a study by two Old Dominion University professors, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, indicated that 6.4 percent of all noncitizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election, and 2.2 percent in the 2010 midterms. Given that 80 percent of noncitizens lean Democratic, they cite Al Franken ’s 312-vote win in the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate race as one likely tipped by noncitizen voting. As a senator, Franken cast the vote representing the 60th needed to make Obamacare law.
Not surprisingly, the blowback and intimidation against their study have chilled research on the issue since then, and new data are scarce.
But the authors’ paper is consistent with other credible reports of noncitizen voting. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 people called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period in one of the 94 current U.S. district courts were noncitizens.
Similarly, TV stations in Florida and other states have found that hundreds of people have been excused for jury duty because they were not citizens but were registered. But the relevant federal agencies refuse — in direct violation of federal law — to cooperate with those few state election officials who attempt to verify citizenship status.
Many of the noncitizens who appear on voter rolls did not intend to register. When people in many states renew their driver’s licenses, they are asked if they want to register to vote. The instructions on the computer screen are sometimes either confusing, or they improperly encourage people to register.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation has successfully forced states including North Carolina and Texas to release information on the voting records of noncitizens. But the toughest nut it has yet to crack is in Pennsylvania, the quintessential swing state in the November election and where Joe Biden won by only one percentage point in 2020.
PILF has fought for six years to obtain records detailing how Pennsylvania allowed thousands of noncitizens to register at local driver’s-license offices. In 2017, Pennsylvania secretary of state Robert Torres admitted that a so-called “glitch” had allowed aliens to register for more than two decades, and he was forced to resign. Testimony before the state legislature noted that the U.S. State Department had identified more than 100,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania who may lack U.S. citizenship. But the state’s only response has been to hire an unknown expert who without explanation reduced the number of suspected noncitizen registrants from 100,000 to 11,198.
Even with that number, Pennsylvania refuses to identify the suspected aliens identified on the voter rolls, their voting histories, and the process used to determine citizenship status. PILF sued for the records and won at the federal-district-court level with the judge. But state officials appealed that judgment to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard PILF’s case last month but has yet to issue its ruling. Even the Biden Justice Department has filed a brief with the Third Circuit agreeing that under the National Voter Registration Act, PILF is entitled to these records.
PILF maintains a database with a list of 602 tied elections and 146 elections decided by one vote over the past two decades. Last year alone, 23 elections resulted in tie votes, with seven of them in Pennsylvania. And don’t forget that the 2000 presidential election was decided in favor of George W. Bush by just 537 votes in one state — Florida. The 2020 presidential election came down to a difference of 43,000 votes in four states.
Any noncitizen who votes effectively disenfranchises legitimate voters by diluting their votes. We can show respect for the rights of those within our borders and at the same time prevent people from violating our voting laws either through willful intent or because they were led astray by others.
Americans deserve to have an electoral process that they can trust and that protects this most sacred right. They are increasingly expressing in poll responses and through their votes in state ballot measures that they believe the integrity of our elections is imperiled.