Fitton: Amnesty Bill Would Harm Election Integrity

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Breitbart News on Wednesday that if the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, which legalizes millions of American’s illegal immigrant population, were to pass, it would hurt the country’s elections.

“Amnesty will harm the integrity our nation’s elections as surely as night follows day,” Fitton said in an email to Breitbart News. “‘Legalizing’ 11 to 20 million aliens will create a new category of potential illicit voters. As it is, our voter rolls have an unknown number of ineligible non-citizen voters. Amnestied aliens will have numerous opportunities to register to vote. And many are bound to improperly do so – and then vote.”

Fitton’s Judicial Watch is in the middle of fighting President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice for documents relating to Attorney General Eric Holder’s team’s coordination with the ACLU in fighting Florida’s efforts to clean up its voter rolls. Judicial Watch announced on Wednesday that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against Holder’s DOJ to force the release of “all records of communications” between the ACLU and the DOJ relating to a June 2012 lawsuit ACLU filed on behalf of the Mi Familia Vota Education Fund to try to prevent Florida from cleaning its voter lists up from ineligible voters.

In the press release announcing the FOIA lawsuit, Fitton said that there is “an unholy alliance between the Obama Department of Justice and leftist organizations such as the ACLU that is a fundamental challenge to the integrity of our electoral system – one that could allow non-citizens to remain on the voting rolls and illegally vote in American elections.”

“That the DOJ couldn’t bother to answer simple questions as required by federal law about one piece of litigation again shows that Eric Holder’s agency has contempt for transparency, accountability, and the rule of law,” Fitton added in that release.

In his comment to Breitbart News, Fitton notes that this ACLU and DOJ coordination case is but one example of the left’s resistance to clean elections and voter rolls. Fitton said that the current immigration bill push to legalize millions of illegal immigrants would only exacerbate the already problematic system. 

“The Obama administration and the Left are adamantly opposed to any rational programs to remove ineligible aliens (legal and illegal) from the voting rolls,” Fitton said. “As a result, this new category of illicit voters will be an x factor in future elections. Dirty voting rolls remain the Achilles heel of our election system, and mass amnesty will make this problem worse.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) argues that any immigration reform package would, in addition to protecting taxpayer dollars and America’s borders, need to “secure the vote.”

“Securing the vote is also important in this debate, and I think Congress should look at reforming our ‘motor voter’ laws to prevent fraud as a large bloc of immigrants are legalized but are not eligible to vote,” Paul wrote in a recent Washington Times op-ed. Paul referred to the National Voter Registration Act signed by President Clinton in 1993 allowing states to register voters when they apply for driver’s licenses. Yet some states fail to require voters to produce driver’s licences when they vote. “Preventing non citizens from being included on the voter rolls is necessary for and consistent with fair immigration reform.”

Tom Fitton is the author of the The New York Times best-selling book Corruption Chronicles.