Alabama made a big splash this summer when Secretary of State Wes Allen announced he had found 3,251 names on his state’s voter rolls that he suspected of being illegal immigrants and had them moved to the inactive voter list.
The plan quickly unraveled.
A little more than a month after notices went out, more than 700 people whose names had been moved came forward to confirm they were eligible citizens. In some cases, they were citizens from birth. Others had been naturalized, but Alabama was using older records.
Just 106 of the people flagged asked that their names be removed. The Justice Department said that isn’t proof they were noncitizens.
A federal judge eventually stepped in and ordered Alabama to restore the other voters to active status.
What was supposed to be a smoking gun for those who see noncitizen voting as a threat to elections turned into a major misfire.
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Yet federal prosecutors in Alabama announced they had snared an illegal immigrant who had been registered and cast ballots in 2016 and 2020.
Angelica Maria Francisco, a 42-year-old Guatemalan woman, admitted in her plea agreement that she was living under a U.S. identity she stole in 2011. She used the ID to register in 2016 and voted illegally in 2016 and 2020.
The cases are two sides of the same coin.
Ms. Francisco’s case proves that some noncitizens do vote in U.S. elections, but Alabama’s attempted purge shows the risk of overestimating the issue.
“I don’t know the number, except I can tell you I’m nearly 100% certain nationwide the number of noncitizens that may be on the voter lists is below 10,000, and nationwide, the number of noncitizens that actually vote is at most measured in the dozens, and probably less,” said David Becker, who runs the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
Purges
Under the law, voting in federal elections is restricted to citizens.
Former President Donald Trump has argued that noncitizens are signing up and turning out in numbers that skew election results. Alabama and other mostly Republican-led states responded by perusing their rolls.
Over several weeks this summer, Alabama revealed its purge, Ohio announced it had found about 600 noncitizens on its rolls, Texas counted 6,500 potential noncitizens, 1,830 of whom had voted in elections, and Florida reported culling 144 noncitizens from its lists.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, said in August that his state had removed 6,300 names of noncitizens from its rolls from January 2022 through July this year. He ordered officials to keep scouring the rolls through Election Day. As of mid-October, officials had removed roughly 1,600 more names before a federal judge stopped them and ordered the names restored.
Virginia has asked the Supreme Court to get involved.
Oregon, a liberal state, announced it had removed more than 1,200 names from its rolls because they lacked proof of citizenship. Officials said last month they were still working to determine whether those people were all ineligible or whether some mistake had been made.
Georgia, a state Mr. Becker describes as the gold standard for registering voters, went through its list of 8.2 million voters and came up with just 20 noncitizen names.
In California, election officials seem bemused that anyone would think to ask about noncitizens on their rolls.
“We don’t have any data to report on instances of non-citizens voting or being incorrectly registered and removed from the voting rolls,” the secretary of state’s office said in response to an inquiry from The Washington Times.
J. Christian Adams, head of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said the state simply isn’t looking.
The foundation released a report this week that studied Alameda County in California and found 54 people who had been registered but later canceled. They acknowledged they weren’t citizens.
In some cases, Alameda approved the registrations even though the applicants provided foreign countries as their places of birth and checked the “No” box when asked whether they were U.S. citizens.
In one case, a woman showed up to vote in 2016 and cast a provisional ballot where she marked that she wasn’t a citizen. It wasn’t until 2018 that election officials canceled her registration after she “came to [the] office with documentation.”
“They just don’t give a rip,” Mr. Adams said. “We actually probably know more about noncitizen voting in California than the secretary of state does.”
At root, the dispute is about where the law should tilt. Democrats’ stance allows every possible vote and risks the chance that ballots from ineligible voters will be counted.
Republicans’ stance, meanwhile, could exclude some valid voters as it works to block those who are ineligible.
That is why the extent of noncitizen voting is critical. If the number is small, Democrats likely have the better argument. Republican arguments make more sense if the problem is larger.
Mr. Becker, a former voting rights lawyer at the Justice Department, said states should be able to accommodate both perspectives.
“That’s a false choice,” he said. “It is entirely possible, given technology we have, for states to do a better job of registering almost all of their eligible citizens, those that want to be registered, and to flag and remove people who aren’t eligible.”
He discounted some of the more extreme theories, such as attributing the illegal immigrant surge to Democrats’ desire to import fraudulent voters.
“No one is crossing through the Darien Gap to cast one ballot in an election in which 160 million ballots are being cast. And if they do, they’re highly likely to be caught, jailed and deported,” he said. “If Democrats’ big plan is to import waves of immigrants so they can vote in the 2036 election, you’ve got to tip your hat to them.”
Legal trouble
The cases that have come to light indicate that the bigger issue is legal immigrants.
Federal prosecutors in North Carolina conducted some fascinating work during the Trump administration. They brought cases against roughly three dozen noncitizens who registered and cast ballots in the 2016 elections.
Nearly every one of the cases involved a legal immigrant, and court documents shed unprecedented light on how they came to be registered.
One told authorities he was pushed to register when he went to a food pantry. Another was signed up when he accompanied his girlfriend to sign up for food stamps. A third said he was pressured by a poll worker to sign up while he was accompanying a friend who was registering. Still another said she signed up after hearing then-President Obama encourage all immigrants to vote. Another said she signed up because the immigration officer who granted her green card said she could “do anything a United States citizen can do.”
She voted in elections and primaries from 2004 through 2016.
Mr. Adams said those stories were typical. He estimated that about 90% of noncitizens who end up on the rolls are in the U.S. legally but haven’t attained citizenship.
Census Bureau research dating back to the Trump administration shows that legal immigrants sometimes don’t know or are afraid to report that they aren’t citizens.
In 2018, as part of a push to add a citizenship question to the decennial count, the bureau analyzed surveys about citizenship and ran responses against other government data. The bureau found that immigrants inaccurately marked that they were citizens in 30% of cases.
“I’m not sure what it means, but it does point to significant confusion about citizenship among a large share of noncitizens,” said Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies. “That has implications for registration and voting.”
“There’s no question noncitizens register to vote and vote. The question has always been how big and does it matter. This kind of analysis shows it could matter,” he said.
In North Carolina, noncitizens cast 99 ballots in elections going back decades.
They spanned racial and ethnic lines. Registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a 3-1 ratio.
Mr. Adams said the disparity is similar nationwide.
“It’s sort of a fluke when you see ones that are registered Republican,” he said. “It’s only a question of whether it’s 2-1 or 7-1.”
He discounted the notion of a mass effort to recruit fraudulent voters.
“If this was a conspiracy to get all these noncitizens in the system, this would be an easier nut to crack. But because it’s organic and discrete events, it’s harder to fix,” said Mr. Adams, who served as a voting rights lawyer in the Justice Department.
States that want to clean their rolls face hurdles, including with federal cooperation.
A group of attorneys general in Republican-led states wrote a letter this month to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas saying his department has stymied efforts to run names by the government’s Person Centric Query Service database.
The department has told the states the database is not “appropriate” for their needs, the state officials said, but they insisted that was not Mr. Mayorkas’ decision to refuse.
“DHS’s statutory mandate to provide information to the States does not depend on DHS’s view on how useful that information may be,” they wrote.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit this month asking a federal judge to order the federal government to help.
“Defendants refuse to comply with law and answer valid requests for information from the Attorney General of Texas and the Secretary of State of Texas for the citizenship status of the over 450,000 people on Texas’s voter rolls for whom the State cannot verify their citizenship status using existing sources,” the lawsuit said.
House Republicans are pursuing legislation that would enforce better cooperation, but that bill has met resistance from Democrats.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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