Noncitizens Will Vote In November, The Only Question Is How Many?

By I & I Editorial Board, Issues & Insights | October 15, 2024

Eight years ago, the mainstream media told us in no uncertain terms that noncitizens don’t vote in American elections. “There is no evidence,” they said. The likely number “is zero.”

They were provably wrong then – there’d been multiple accounts of noncitizens who’d registered and voted in elections. In the years since, the evidence of this problem has piled up higher. But the media are still at it. It’s “extremely rare,” they say. It never “affects the outcome of a race.” Republicans are looking to “blame illegals” if Donald Trump loses, etc.

Here’s one example of the disconnect.

An audit of Texas voter rolls in 2019 found 95,000 noncitizens who’d registered, 58,000 of whom voted in an election. This year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he’d removed 6,500 noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls, nearly 2,000 of whom voted.

Yet just this weekend, ABC News ran a piece titled: “In South Texas, the myth of noncitizen voting takes center stage.”

But it’s the media that’s peddling the myth. Voter rolls are criminally outdated and error prone. Some states are so eager to register voters that they don’t put up needed safeguards. When election officials do bother to audit their registration rolls, they keep turning up thousands of noncitizens.

Consider these recent examples:

• Virginia’s attorney general recently announced the state moved 6,303 noncitizens from its voter rolls in 2022 and 2023.
• Arizona admitted a massive error in its voter rolls resulted in 218,000 registered voters who lacked proof of U.S. citizenship.
• A suit filed in Nevada asserts that as many as 11,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in the state and nearly 4,000 of them voted in 2020.
• An Oregon audit found nearly 1,300 noncitizens registered to vote in that state.
• Ohio’s secretary of state found nearly 600 noncitizens registered to vote.

Meanwhile, a local news investigation found mailers sent to noncitizens by their union – LIUNA – urging them to “Stop the Steal” and vote for Kamala Harris in November.

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project gathered video evidence of noncitizens in Arizona and Georgia admitting on camera that they are registered to vote. They also found fliers in an illegal immigrant staging area in Mexico urging them to vote in November.

Dozens of lawmakers are pressing Attorney General Merrick Garland about what he is doing to stop noncitizens from voting. “Clearly, there is a non-negligible amount of voter participation by noncitizens in federal elections,” they say, “which is not only a serious threat to the integrity of our elections and the democratic process they represent, but also has the potential to reduce Americans’ trust and confidence in election results.”

But the Biden-Harris Justice Department appears more interested in preventing states from cleaning their voter rolls of noncitizens.

Last week, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued a statement: “With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls.”

And Democrats blocked a bill – the SAVE Act – that would have simply required some proof of citizenship in order to vote.

It’s almost as if Democrats want to let noncitizens vote.  

Yet the press continues to claim this is a non-issue, using the laughably lame argument that noncitizens don’t vote because it’s illegal for them to do so.

And in any case, they say, even if some do vote, it never affects the outcome of an election.

Except that’s a myth, too. A 2014 paper in the journal of Electoral Studies found that “the proportion of noncitizens who voted (in 2008) was less than 15%, but significantly greater than zero. Similarly, in 2010 we found that more than 3% of noncitizens reported voting.”

It went on to say that: “We find that some noncitizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and congressional elections.”

Keep in mind that the 2020 election was decided by a few thousand votes in some states – a small enough margin that illegal voters could make the difference.

So why do the media bury their collective heads in the sand about this? We will give you one guess.

Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.

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