Allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, have raised concerns about the integrity of our election process, including voting by non-citizens.
Examining Virginia’s state records, the nonpartisan Public Interest Legal Foundation and Virginia Voters Alliance uncovered 5,556 non-citizens registered to vote in the state. Of those 5,556 individuals, state Department of Elections records, cross-checked with DMV files, revealed 1,852 had voted 7,474 times over multiple years.
If the presidential Commission on Election Integrity follows suit and vets voter records in the other 49 states, the 5,556 non-citizen voters in Virginia could prove to be a drop in the bucket for the rest of the country.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe wants to keep the public in the dark. McAuliffe, who vetoed six voter-identification bills this year, is leading fellow Democratic governors in rebuffing requests for information by the presidential commission.
McAuliffe & Co. say they’re protecting “privacy,” but these states have provided detailed voter data to political parties and campaign apparatuses for years. Meantime, several of the states (including Republican-led Florida and Texas) have counties whose voter rolls are larger than their voting-age populations.
While politicians have political motivations to grandstand and obstruct, federal immigration officials have no such excuse. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has statutory authority to gather information on voting fraud by aliens and to investigate instances of such deception. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, any alien who votes in violation of any federal, state or local constitutional provision, statute, ordinance or regulation is deportable.
Yet the USCIS is slow-jamming the commission’s inquiries. Why? It turns out that USCIS isn’t gathering or tracking the relevant information. This may (or may not) be surprising, but USCIS has ignored the responsibilities Congress assigned to it with regard to policing illegal voting by aliens.
Commission Vice Chairman Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, wants to make it easy on the Beltway bureaucrats: Simply provide the identifications of noncitizens living as permanent residents with green cards, and the commission will do the data crunching itself.
Open those voter books, now.