On Thursday, Just the News posted an article about the number of non-citizens voting in American elections.
The article reports:
The dual revelations that an illegal alien school administrator from Iowa made it onto the voter rolls in Maryland and that over 2,700 noncitizens escaped strict voter ID checks to qualify to vote in Texas are creating new momentum for creating a nationwide citizenship check system for elections.
“Many folks that come into my office will tell me, and anyone who will listen, this is the biggest issue in the country. Democrats don’t want tightly run elections,” Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., told Just the News on Thursday night. “We all know that they want as much room for, you know, fraud, as humanly possible.”
“So right now, in many states, you can just check a box and say you’re a citizen, and that’s it. What we’re fighting for is we’re actually fighting that you as a citizen have to prove that you’re a citizen of this country if you’re going to vote in our election,” he said during an interview on the Just the News No Noise television show.
Crane and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, are spearheading a campaign to mandate proof of U.S. citizenship for voter registration in upcoming federal elections.
The article concludes:
The notion and popularity of only lawful citizens voting in elections is not new.
In the late 1990s, Democrats, led by President Bill Clinton, firmly opposed non-citizen voting, which led to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). This law, passed with strong Democratic support (72-27 in the Senate, 370-37 in the House), criminalized non-citizen voting in federal elections, imposing fines, up to one year in prison, and deportation. Clinton framed it as a defense of legal residents and electoral integrity, reflecting the party’s unified stance that only citizens should vote in federal races.
Republicans have expressed identical sentiment in their fight to keep noncitizens off of voter rolls.
Using a Real ID would be a step in fighting this problem, although you can get a Real ID if you have a Permanent Resident Card (Green Card) if you are a non-U.S. citizen. I suspect that very few of the people who are illegally voting in our elections have green cards. Using Real ID as voter identification might be a step in the right direction.