OPINION:
To fully understand how Democrats plan to turn America into a single-party state, take a look at two of their seemingly disparate actions shortly after President Biden’s inauguration.
In Washington, Democrats immediately pushed legislation to fundamentally take over state-run elections to greatly loosen voter registration rules. While GOP senators stalled the bill in January, Democrats have vowed to enact the unprecedented federalization, somehow, someday.
At the southern border, Mr. Biden has illegally opened the gates to just about anyone — be they drug and sex traffickers, or migrant job seekers, or sex offenders or other criminals. The brutal Mexican drug cartels are getting richer. Their Chinese-produced fentanyl is killing record numbers of Americans. Official count of people illegally entering the U.S. is in the millions in 2021-22 and will go even higher the rest of Mr. Biden’s term because he wants it to.
Take the two separately or together — federalized ballot counting and opened borders — and you’ve got yourself a successful Democratic voter drive.
“You know, 11 million people live in the shadows,” then-Vice President Biden said in 2014 of the U.S. illegal population. “I believe they’re already American citizens.”
Candidate Biden urged foreign invaders to “surge” and promised them free stuff. His Department of Homeland Secretary chief has pledged not to deport illegals. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said illegals are free to roam the country. Mr. Biden is about to suspend a public health law that will result in a half-million illegal crossings in a matter of weeks, Republicans say.
Democrats badly need more foreigners to vote. Polls show Hispanic citizens are drifting away from the Democratic Party’s sharp turn to the left. School kids are now one of liberals’ main targets as unionized teachers try to turn them into good little “wokes.”
On the legislative end, the Democrats’ repackaged the “Freedom to Vote Act” this year. It would strip away enough safeguards to ensure that a significant number of noncitizens will get to vote, albeit illegally.
To start with, the companion House-Senate measures would usher in a chaotic untested method for automatically registering voters, perhaps hundreds of thousands or more. Various government agencies and colleges would be mandated to flood state registrars with names from their databases, with orders to register them.
It would also require national same-day registration and voting, something only 20 states allow now.
The legislation says auto-registered people must be citizens, but the language is iffy on how that rule is enforced. If a noncitizen does vote and is caught, the person has near-blanket immunity from prosecution. This promise comes under the bill’s innocuous heading: “Protections for Errors in Registration.”
I asked Hans von Spakovsky, The Heritage Foundation’s manager of its election law reform project, if the Freedom to Vote Act will, in fact, make it easier for noncitizens to vote.
“The simple answer is ‘yes,’” he said, “because of the automatic voter registration requirement. The fact that a non-citizen got registered and voted can’t be used in a federal or state criminal prosecution, or any immigration proceedings, unless you can show he did so ‘knowingly and willfully,’ a very difficult standard to meet.”
“All an alien has to do is say it was an ‘error’ on his part and he is home free. … Moreover, if he fails to check the box on the federal registration form where you are supposed to answer whether or not you are a citizen, this provision also gives you immunity from being prosecuted for registering as an alien in violation of the law. This provision will make it virtually impossible to go after aliens who illegally register and then vote.”
Mr. von Spakovsky added that some of these automatically registered people will become commingled in driver’s license databases.
“Legal aliens can get licenses in every state and illegal aliens in more than a dozen and a half states,” he said. “So this provision will likely lead to the registration of many aliens unless states put in very specific procedures to prevent that from happening. In sanctuary states like California, that seems highly unlikely.”
The Democrats’ bills would also restrict access to voter rolls by outside groups — in other words conservative legal groups who regularly audit lists. They find dead voters and people who have not voted in years or people who voted twice.
Even without the election takeover bills, illegals are voting now:
• Polling data consistently shows that noncitizens vote by the thousands, according to analysis by professor Jesse Richman at Old Dominion University.
• There is smoking gun proof. Citizens filed open-records requests in Frederick County, Maryland. The data showed that people who bowed out of jury duty because they were not citizens were in fact registered to vote and a significant number did vote.
• Thanks to a Public Interest Legal Foundation lawsuit, a federal judge in March ordered Pennsylvania to release data on noncitizens being allowed to register to vote for years when they obtained driver’s licenses.
• Earlier this month, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced he has referred 1,634 cases of “potential non-citizens registering to vote” to criminal investigators and the State Election Board. The number is based on his office’s “citizenship audit” of voter rolls. Attempting to register violates Georgia law if the person is informed that noncitizens are barred.
Democrats, with a wink and a nod, want to keep illegals voting. Blue states refused to cooperate with a special commission named by former President Donald Trump to compare voting rolls with federal immigration records.
Polls predict a Republican election blowout this November. The president so far has not gotten his election overhaul, but he has kept the illegals flowing over the southern border to vote — now and later — for his party.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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