The Washington Times has reported that non-Americans continue to be found on voter rolls in alarming numbers, despite continued claims by liberals that voter fraud is a non-existent problem. In some of these cases, the individuals are unaware that they’ve been registered to vote, adding fodder to claims that voter fraud is often an orchestrated effort to not only sway polls but to advocate for allowing non-Americans to vote in elections.
According to the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), non-Americans have been added to voter rolls in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Virginia. PILF found that of those numbers, a significant portion have been able to cast their ballots. In May 2017, PILF issued a report stating that in Virginia, 5,556 noncitizens were removed from the voting rolls between 2011 and May 2017. The PILF report also found that 1,852 of them had cast ballots. And the problem is ongoing.
PILF contends that this could be easily avoided if states required individuals to prove voter eligibility before allowing them to register.
“Our voter registration system masks non-citizens and allows the opportunity to vote until they decide to self-report at their own peril. All of this could have been prevented if states actually verified citizen eligibility upfront,” Logan Churchwell, communications and research director for the foundation, told the Times.
As noted above, in some cases, non-Americans are unaware that they’ve even been registered to vote. Case in point: Elizaveta Shuvalova, a Russian citizen who only last year became an American citizen, was shocked to learn that she was registered as an eligible voter in 2012 and added to the San Francisco voter polls despite having never registered to vote and only recently being granted citizenship.
“This is definitely a shocker to me. It is like an identity fraud because this is not coming from my end,” Shuvalova told the Times. “Like I told you, I haven’t even been a citizen during that time frame. So what can we do about it?”
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John Arntz, director of the San Francisco Department of Elections, states that activists will often distribute registration cards along with their petitions and that it is the role of election authorities to check the registration application with other databases to insure citizen eligibility. Yet Shuvalova went undetected as a non-citizen and began receiving voting ballots — nine to be exact — until 2016, when she returned a ballot with a note that she was not yet a citizen and therefore unable to vote.
But how many others would be as honest as Shuvalova and refuse to vote despite having the unwarranted option staring them directly in the face? And is it all that cynical to believe that these activists who are registering non-citizens are in fact relying on the incompetence of federal and state governments to overlook non-citizen voters?
Interestingly enough, the majority of Democrat voters support allowing non-citizens to vote in American elections, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll. Fifty-four percent of polled Democrats stated that illegal aliens should have the right to vote if they pay taxes, and 53 percent of self-described liberals said they supported allowing illegal aliens the right to vote.
By comparison, 60 percent of American voters overall remain opposed to allowing illegal aliens to vote, underscoring once more the disconnect between liberal Democrats and the majority of Americans.
Non-citizens are already permitted to vote in local and school-board elections in various cities throughout the country, a tactic that critics contend is just part of the Left’s long-range plan to grant non-citizens the right to vote in statewide and national elections.
“Who doubts this is the first step by the left and Democrats toward full voting rights in state and eventually in federal elections?” wrote conservative columnist Cal Thomas last week. “The claim by lawyers will be that it is discriminatory to allow undocumented immigrants to vote in local and state elections and not for members of Congress and for president. At bottom this is what the entire immigration debate is about.”
For liberal Democrats, the reasoning is sound: Granting the right to vote to the millions of illegal aliens living in the United States would ensure Democratic strongholds in state and national elections, since immigrants overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Breitbart News observes that the country’s legal immigration system is preparing to important at least eight million new foreign-born voters in the next two decades. As such, non-liberals in states with heavily foreign-born populations would repeatedly have their voices silenced election after election if the Democrats had their way.
And the prevalence of non-citizen voters on voting rolls may be just the ammunition liberal Democrats need to make a national push to grant non-citizens the right to vote in the same way they used the existence of “back-alley” abortions to advocate for legalized abortions. Rather than getting tougher on voter fraud, they’d rather eliminate the obstacles for the lawbreakers and in the process, gain an army of supporters who will be eternally grateful to the party that continually places their needs over those of the American people.
Correction: This article originally stated that “in 2017 in Virginia alone, 5,600 people on the rolls in Virginia were found to be non-citizens, a third of whom voted in previous elections as well.” This finding was in a report released by the Public Interest Legal Foundation in May 2017, but the noncitizens who were found by Virginia election officials and removed from the rolls was for the period 2011 though 2017. The article has been corrected, and the exact numbers (5,556 noncitizens, 1,852 of whom cast ballots before being removed from the rolls) were worked into the revised segment of the article.
