The federal government needs to give states access to critical databases to weed out noncitizens who are registering and casting ballots in elections, Florida’s secretary of state told Congress on Thursday.
Cord Byrd said the feds have data that can help, but they don’t make it easily available in a timely manner.
“The federal government has a legal obligation to provide up-to-date citizenship information to the states,” Mr. Byrd told the House Administration Committee, saying that without that, states can have “a gap” in their efforts to maintain clean voter lists.
Republicans called the hearing to highlight what former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have identified as a major issue six months out from the 2024 vote.
Rep. Bryan Steil, the Wisconsin Republican who ran Thursday’s hearing, was particularly irked over the District of Columbia’s new noncitizen voter system, which the city says will allow those who’ve been residents of the city for 30 days or longer to vote in local elections, regardless of citizenship or legal status.
The District is running a public relations campaign to try to boost noncitizen enrollment.
Mr. Steil said the city maintains only one voting list and will struggle with separating noncitizens only voting in local elections from ballots of citizens who will be voting in the presidential election.
“The Board of Elections says it is on the noncitizen to understand they cannot vote in federal races,” Mr. Steil said.
In a statement to The Washington Times, the board said the hearing spread “misinformation” about the city’s system.
The board said it stores the noncitizen information in a “separate component” of its registration system and is confident it can deliver the correct ballots to the right voters, including only a local ballot to noncitizens.
“We do have strong systems in place to ensure all voters in D.C. receive their correct ballot,” the board said.
It also said mailers urging registration are part of the board’s mission “to ensure that eligible voters in D.C. are aware of their rights and responsibilities.”
The board said, “This extends to all eligible voters, including non-citizens, through non-partisan, voter education activities. We do not advocate for any particular group to register to vote.”
J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, testified to the committee that noncitizens are often duped into registering and voting by bungling bureaucrats and bad systems.
He pointed to Pennsylvania, where, for years, the motor vehicle bureau’s system prompted everyone — including noncitizens — to register to vote. Mr. Adams said people did end up wrongly registered.
“The question is whether it was 10,000 or 100,000,” he said.
Democrats complained about the entire tenor of the hearing, saying it was an attempt to undermine confidence in the presidential election before the first votes are ever cast.
“The coup starts here. This is where it begins,” said Rep. Joe Morelle, New York Democrat. He said he’s seen no evidence that noncitizen voting is an issue.
Democrats’ witness during the hearing, Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said Congress should instead focus on cutting barriers to voting and should expand the Voting Rights Act to force jurisdictions to undergo scrutiny before they change voting rules.
Mr. Waldman’s group did a review after the 2016 election and said it came up with just 30 instances where someone was investigated for being a noncitizen who cast a ballot that year.
“Our system is secure,” Mr. Waldman said.
GOP witnesses said it’s impossible to gauge the extent of noncitizen voting because officials often don’t investigate it even when they’re made aware.
Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member who’s now at the Heritage Foundation, said he served on the Fairfax County elections board in Virginia and in 2011 he prompted the registrar to match its voting records against DMV records.
The registrar found 278 people who were noncitizens registered to vote, and 117 of them had voted before.
He said the names were then stripped from the county rolls and forwarded to prosecutors, but they did nothing about it.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.