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Florida, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Missouri and Texas have recently announced plans to allow non-citizens to vote in state elections.
Okay, that’s an attempt at humor. The just-mentioned states are planning no such thing.
Now the sobering news: California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Vermont and the District of Columbia really are gearing up to push through legislation that would give non-citizens voting rights.
According to a recent article in Human Events, all of those states either already allow non-citizens to vote in at least some local jurisdictions, or are pursuing changes in law that would dilute citizen voting rights by allowing non-citizens to vote in local and even state-wide elections.
In California, for example, non-citizens already have the right to vote in school board elections in San Francisco, and Los Angeles is studying a proposal to follow suit.
In Maryland, non-citizens are currently allowed to vote in local elections in nine local jurisdictions, including Barnesville, Chevy Chase, Garrett Park, Glen Echo, Martin’s Additions, Somerset and Takoma Park, which kicked off the practice back in 1991.
Illinois has been a “trailblazer” in providing voting rights and taxpayer money to non-citizens. It was the first state to give Medicaid to income eligible residents regardless of immigration status. Chicago has long allowed non-citizen voting, and the state senate is considering allowing non-citizens to vote in local school board elections statewide.
Several cities in Vermont let non-citizens vote in mayoral, city council and school board elections.
And in New York City, the governing council is currently considering a proposal to give voting rights to non-citizens. It could end up adding an estimated 600,000 non-citizens to the city’s voter rolls.
That’s probably even more than the city’s deceased voters.
There was plenty of controversy in the election of 2020, at least some of which involved allegations that illegal immigrants and legal non-citizen residents were being encouraged and courted to cast ballots. Such voting in Federal elections is illegal.
Or perhaps, to be politically correct, should the term be “undocumented voting.”
Despite the Federal prohibition, it’s a fact that voting fraud involving non-citizen voting exists, and in numbers that are enough to sway elections.
To give just one example, the Fort Worth Star Telegram reported in 2019 that some 56 thousand non-citizens voted illegally in one or more elections over a period of time spanning about 20 years.
According to the Star, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley said a year-long evaluation found about 95,000 people described as “non-U.S. citizens” were registered to vote in Texas.