Vote Integrity's Nitty-Gritty: The Battle Lines of '24's Epic Struggle

More than a dozen jurisdictions run by Democrats – including Washington D.C., and several adjacent Maryland municipalities – allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. San Francisco not only permits noncitizens to vote but appointed one to serve on its Elections Commission.

Such developments, against a backdrop of millions of illegal migrants streaming into the United States under the Biden-Harris administration, bring new urgency to debates over election integrity. Many Republicans fear that a widespread effort is afoot to give noncitizens the full benefits of citizenship, including the right to vote in all elections, on top of benefits already available to illegal aliens in some places, notably drivers licenses, food stamps, government health care, and work visas.

Although Democrats note that noncitizens may not participate in federal elections and claim there is little evidence noncitizens are voting unlawfully, critics are unmollified.

From the article:

States across the country report that thousands of noncitizens have been discovered on voter rolls in the past decade, with unknown numbers already having voted:

Pennsylvania found 11,000 registrants suspected of being noncitizens after becoming aware of a decades-old “glitch” in the state’s “motor voter” registration system in 2017. It removed 2,500 individuals from the rolls, and it could not verify the citizenship status of the other 8,700 registrants.

Virginia has removed over 11,000 registrants from its rolls between 2014-2023 – and more than 6,300 from January 2022 to July 2024 alone – upon learning that they had declared themselves noncitizens in other interactions with government, typically in transactions with the state’s department of motor vehicles. House Republicans cited a study showing that of nearly 1,500 noncitizens the Commonwealth removed from rolls from May 2023 to February 2024, 23% had cast ballots since February 2019.

New Jersey had some 616 self-reported noncitizens in 11 counties “engaged on some level with the statewide registration system,” 9% of whom cast ballots, according to a 2017 survey conducted by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

Boston, Massachusetts, officials revealed this year that the city had removed 70 noncitizens from the rolls, some 22 of whom had voted, the removals coming in response to disclosure requests from the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

Ohio recently ordered the removal of 499 noncitizens from its voter rolls after removing some 137 other registrants back in May.

North Carolina identified more than 1,400 registrants on state voter rolls who did not appear to be naturalized, in an audit conducted prior to the 2014 midterm election. Eighty-nine flagged individuals appeared at the polls to vote, and 24 had their registration challenged; 11 challenges were sustained or justified.

Arizona classifies some 42,000 people on its rolls as “federal-only” registrants as of July 1, 2024 – after they had failed to provide the proof of citizenship necessary to vote in state and local races. The state’s bifurcated voter rolls are the result of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling in which a 7-2 majority led by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that federal voter registration requirements – of which documentary proof of citizenship is not one – preempted the state’s standards.

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