Today 2:53 am
I & I Editorial Board
October 15, 2024Eight years ago, the mainstream media told us in no uncertain terms that noncitizens don’t vote in American elections. “There is no evidence,” they said. The likely number “is zero.”
They were provably wrong then – there’d been multiple accounts of noncitizens who’d registered and voted in elections. In the years since, the evidence of this problem has piled up higher. But the media are still at it. It’s “extremely rare,” they say. It never “affects the outcome of a race.”
Republicans are looking to “blame illegals” if Donald Trump loses, etc.
Here’s one example of the disconnect.An audit of Texas voter rolls in 2019 found 95,000 noncitizens who’d registered, 58,000 of whom voted in an election. This year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he’d removed 6,500 noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls, nearly 2,000 of whom voted.
Yet just this weekend, ABC News ran a piece titled: “In South Texas, the myth of noncitizen voting takes center stage.”
But it’s the media that’s peddling the myth. Voter rolls are criminally outdated and error prone. Some states are so eager to register voters that they don’t put up needed safeguards. When election officials do bother to audit their registration rolls, they keep turning up thousands of noncitizens.Consider these recent examples:
- Virginia’s attorney general recently announced the state moved 6,303 noncitizens from its voter rolls in 2022 and 2023.
- Arizona admitted a massive error in its voter rolls resulted in 218,000 registered voters who lacked proof of U.S. citizenship.
- A suit filed in Nevada asserts that as many as 11,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in the state and nearly 4,000 of them voted in 2020.
- An Oregon audit found nearly 1,300 noncitizens registered to vote in that state.
- Ohio’s secretary of state found nearly 600 noncitizens registered to vote.