A handful of Democratic-run cities are considering plans to allow non-citizens and illegal aliens to vote in elections, which would further strengthen Democratic incumbents and blur the differences between citizen and non-citizen.
New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, and a handful of Maryland jurisdictions allow non-citizens to participate in some types of local or school elections. On November 8, San Franciscans will get to choose whether or not their sanctuary city that protects illegal aliens, including repeat criminals such as Kate Steinle’s alleged killer, from deportation, will also allow non-citizens to vote in school board elections.
Similar measures failed in 2004 and 2010, but San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu, whose parents were Taiwanese immigrants, is confident it stands a good chance of passing this year because there is no organized opposition. “I think that’s because of the ugly, anti-immigrant statements expressed by Donald Trump and his supporters,” he told Bloomberg News.
The article slams Donald Trump’s warnings about voter fraud by non-citizens, saying “there’s no evidence to support the Republican nominee’s claims of election fraud, ” even as it describes the Democrats’ effort in cities to give ballots to illegals.
An energetic debate on whether or not to allow non-citizens to vote in American elections has taken place for most of the country’s history.
As Bloomberg notes, as many as 40 states used to allow non-citizens to vote before this country covered the span of a continent and immigration came from Europe. When high levels of European immigration spurred the Coolidge administration to shut down the unpopular inflow of mass migration, reducing the annual inflow from one million to around 150,000, states also moved to end non-citizen voting. Arkansas finally closing the door on non-citizen voting in 1926.
The Bloomberg article largely ignores the practical impact on Americans of voting by large blocs of illegals in favor of focus on the interests of illegals. For example, many African-American communities — already overwhelmed by a flood of cheap, imported labor — would likely lose percentage points in local disputes, where even small numbers can swing elections.
Currently, it’s illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, but that has not stopped President Barack Obama’s deputies from making it difficult to remove them from the voter rolls.
As election-law expert Hans A. von Spakovsky has exhaustively documented, granting non-citizens privileges normally reserved for citizens willy-nilly results in fraud. But “there has been virtually no discussion of how to ensure that they (and millions of legal aliens) do not register and vote in elections,” he wrote in a analysis published by the Heritage Foundation.
There is no systematic review of voter registration rolls by states to find non-citizens, and the relevant federal agencies-in direct violation of federal law-refuse to cooperate with state election officials seeking to verify the citizenship status of registered voters…The refusal of federal agencies to obey the law compels local election officials to rely almost entirely on the ‘honor system’ to keep non-citizens from the polls.
Discoveries of non-citizens on voter rolls is “accidental,” he adds:
Though the Department of Justice has no procedures in place for a systematic investigation of these types of criminal violations, in just a three-year period, it prosecuted and convicted more than a dozen non-citizens who registered and voted in federal elections in Alaska, Florida, the District of Columbia, and Colorado. Among them was an alien in southern Florida, Rafael Velasquez, who not only voted, but even ran for the state legislature. Eight of the 19 September 11 hijackers were registered to vote in either Virginia or Florida-registrations that were probably obtained when they applied for driver’s licenses.