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.
