1.5 to 2.7 Million Illegals Likely to Vote in 2024: Experts

By Ben Johnson, The Washington Stand

Do you plan to vote this November? You’re not alone. Experts say somewhere between 1.5 million and 2.7 million illegal immigrants are likely to cast a ballot in the 2024 elections, impacting races from dog catcher to president of the United States.

The historic flood of illegal immigrants during the Biden-Harris administration has also padded voter rolls, thanks to controversial federal legislation from the Clinton administration. If illegal immigrants and other noncitizens vote in the same proportion as in previous U.S. elections, the number will range anywhere from one-and-a-half to nearly three million votes.

“A 2014 academic journal found that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008,” Kerri Toloczko, executive director of Election Integrity Network and senior advisor to the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, told The Washington Stand. “There are about 24 million noncitizens in the U.S. right now. If they voted only at the same rate of 6.4% this year as they did in 2008, they would account for 1.5 million votes.”

That ponderous number of unlawful votes may just be the tip of the iceberg. “Based on the increased noncitizen activity at state DMVs, and the work of left-wing voter registration activists, this 6.4% could be much higher than it was in 2008. We could be looking at over two million unlawful noncitizen votes,” she told TWS.

Her estimate largely dovetails with a previous study showing 2.7 million noncitizens are likely to vote in the 2024 election.

The author of that study — James D. Agresti, the president and cofounder of the think tank and fact-check website Just Facts — confirmed to TWS that “the most comprehensive, transparent, and rigorous study on this matter found that about two to five million noncitizens are illegally registered to vote, and aggressive attempts to debunk the study have completely failed.”

Opponents of election integrity laws minimize the problem by claiming it is already illegal for foreigners to vote in U.S. elections. But, unlike other purported threats, the problem truly holds the power to undermine our democracy, election experts say. “The Left likes to use phrases like, ‘It’s not that widespread,’” Toloczko observed. “But how many does a moral relativist uninterested in upholding the law think is too many?” And “if every unlawful vote cancels out the vote of a lawful citizen voter, how many of those are acceptable?”

Would two million unlawful votes be “enough to possibly make a difference in House and Senate races, and even the presidency?” she asked. “You bet.”

Agresti noted that “the claim that noncitizens rarely vote is based on studies with absurd methodologies. For example, they measure the prevalence of this crime by merely counting convictions for it.”

This is “ridiculous,” Agresti told TWS. He compared the statistic to measuring the number of Americans who illegally use narcotics “based on guilty pleas and verdicts. The same applies to any other law that isn’t strictly enforced, like driving above the speed limit.”

The House of Representatives released a 22-page report in June documenting illegal immigrants voting in the United States. Under current law, 17 cities in California, Maryland, and Vermont as well as the District of Columbia allow noncitizens to vote. While the noncitizens are supposed to vote only in local elections, “mistakes” have been reported.

Toloczko highlighted documented cases of foreigners illegally voting in U.S. elections. “The federal government recently indicted a group of noncitizens from 15 different countries on federal voting charges. Texas recently purged 6,500 noncitizens from its voter rolls — 30% of whom had voting records,” Toloczko told TWS, expressing similar thoughts in The Stream.

Illegal immigration impacts U.S. elections in a second way: Counting noncitizens in the U.S. Census redistributes eight congressional seats and, with them, their Electoral College votes which elect the president, a team of immigration scholars found. America’s teeming illegal immigrant population gives additional congressional seats to California (3), Texas (2), New York, New Jersey, and Florida (one each); and it takes seats away from Alabama, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, Ohio, Rhode Island, and West Virginia (one seat each). Illegal immigrants alone transfer one seat each from Ohio, Alabama, and Minnesota to California, Texas, and New York, the study from the Center for Immigration Studies found.

House Republicans have sought to address the problem by passing a number of border security and election integrity measures, including the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act (H.R. 8281), which would require local election officials to verify someone’s U.S. citizenship status before registering that person to vote. It passed the House of Representatives in July.

“States are prohibited from requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship” thanks to court interpretations of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) told Fox Business show “Mornings with Maria” on Tuesday. “Democrats who vote against that show what they are really up to: that they want noncitizens to vote and rig our elections.”

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) has called the bill’s passage “a generation-defining moment.” Johnson favors attaching the election integrity bill to a must-pass continuing resolution to keep the government funded past the end of the fiscal year on September 30 and avert a government shutdown. Yet Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has declared the bill dead on arrival in the Senate. “What is he afraid of?” asked Senator Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) on Tuesday morning on Fox Business.

The underlying numbers behind the 1.5 to 2.7 million noncitizen vote count may undercount the extent of the problem. Yale University researchers estimated the size of the U.S. illegal immigrant population at 16 to 29 million in 2016, before the Biden-Harris administration enacted border policies that saw record-breaking levels of illegal immigration every year to date. While administration officials channeled illegal immigration into ports of entry and other means such as the CBP One app which reduce the number of entries on paper during this presidential election year, experts say the number of overall immigrants entering the U.S. has remained the same or increased.

Americans have increasingly groaned under the strain of illegal immigration. Video footage has shown members of the Venezuelan transnational criminal organization Tren de Aragua (TdA) rampaging through the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, where they reportedly terrorize and extort residents of multiple apartment buildings.

The Biden-Harris administration has placed roughly 20,000 Haitians in the town of Springfield, Ohio — a town of 58,000 Americans — where they have proceeded to drive up housing costs, underbid American workers for jobs, and engage in a spree of car crashes. The problem has reportedly spread to the nearby town of Tremont. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) recently sent the city millions of dollars and deployed a team of Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers to get the deadly traffic problem under control. Although the legacy media attempted to pin a large reported number of bomb threats against Springfield schools and other institutions on J.D. Vance and other politicians who have highlighted the city’s plight, DeWine verified that officials determined that all 33 threats were “hoaxes” that originated overseas.

Mayors of Aurora and Tremont say they were not consulted about the resettling of these foreigners in their cities.

A Axios/Harris poll released in April showed a majority of Americans support the mass deportation of illegal immigrants back to their countries of origin. Overall, 51% of U.S. citizens back the Trump-endorsed policy of deportations, including about half (46%) of all registered Independents. A surprisingly high 42% of Democrats support mass deportations, likely fueled by the increasing number of African Americans — who have voted as high as nine out of 10 for the Democratic presidential candidate — who see their neighborhoods impacted by a surging illegal immigrant population, especially in sanctuary cities. Their cities’ Democratic leaders often divert taxpayer funds, and deny taxpayer-funded services to U.S. citizens, in favor of illegal immigrants.

As the government funding drama plays out in the U.S. Capitol, America First Legal has filed numerous lawsuits contending that two provisions of federal law — 8 U.S.C. § 1373(c) and 8 U.S.C. § 1644 — already allow state and local officials to obtain information about applicants’ citizenship status before registration.

“The reason why [Democrats have] got that wide-open border is so they can get as many illegals in here and get them to vote, so they can dominate the American vote,” Rep. Mike Ezell (R-Miss.) told “Washington Watch” in July. “They want to dominate the House, the Senate, and the White House.”

“They want to get elected by any means necessary,” Ezell said.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.