A new report from The New York Post claims that non-citizens are receiving voter registration forms when they fill out other government paperwork in every single state in the US besides Arizona, which passed a law to ban the practice.
Many government offices throughout the country are reportedly including voter registration forms when people come in for welfare benefits, driver’s licenses, or mail-in ballots. Insofar as a migrant has humanitarian parole, refugee, or asylum designations, they are allowed to collect benefits in many cities from the same offices that distribute voter registration forms to US citizens.
Critics are concerned this will inevitably mean that illegal immigrants—who can receive welfare as well as driver’s licenses in many states—will easily register to vote without having their citizenship status checked. Voting as a non-citizen and falsely claiming to have US citizenship is illegal, but there is no federal law mandating voting registration operations to require proof of US citizenship.
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The Department of Homeland Security projects that more than 8 million illegal immigrants will be living in the United States by October, a 167 percent increase in five years.
Hans von Spakovsky, the manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation, presented examples of non-citizens voting in American elections while testifying before the House Administration Committee in mid-May.
Spakovsky, along with J. Christian Adams (president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation), presented Congress with a list of 19 illegal aliens “from Italy, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, the Philippines, Panama, South Korea, Poland, Guatemala, Nigeria, and Canada” who were prosecuted and convicted in the state of North Carolina for illegally voting in multiple state elections.
One individual, Mr. Abdelmounim of Pittsburgh, wrote a letter to Allegheny County election officials demanding to be removed from voter rolls. “I was mistakenly registered to vote because I did not understand the questions I was being asked” by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), he said. According to Spakovsky, litigative action by an affiliate of the Heritage Foundation discovered that 10,000-20,000 illegal immigrants have been registered to vote by the PennDOT over the last 20 years.
A man named Conroy was permitted to register to vote despite being a non-citizen. He himself had to ask to be removed from the rolls later on—no government worker had noticed beforehand.
The pair also presented similar evidence of non-citizen voting in California, New Jersey, and Chicago.
In 2023, New York City gave 720,765 people cash welfare, swelling the welfare levels to the highest they have been since 2000. The administration of Governor Kathy Hochul is using taxpayer funds to give welfare to aliens through the Safety Net Assistance program, which is intended for US citizens but was modified in May to permit migrants to become recipients. The city is now home to more than 66,000 illegals. The New York Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) swears that the SNA payments will only be a “small portion” of the $4.3 billion Hochul has allocated for the migrant crisis.
Last month, the Republican-led House Administration Committee approved of a new bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require states to determine citizenship status of anyone registering to vote, whether by mail, at the DMV, or at a welfare office. “It is undeniable that the current structure makes it possible for illegal immigrants and non-citizens to vote — and the American people have no way of knowing how widespread the problem may be,” said Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action.
But have the Republicans scheduled the bill for a floor vote yet? No. One Congressional source reassured the New York Post that the bill “could” be scheduled before the recess in August. Meanwhile, the left is already prepared to fight it. “Shameful bills like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act often result in eligible US citizens being incorrectly prevented from voting or being forced to jump through additional hoops to exercise their freedom to vote,” said the executive director of the left-wing Campaign Legal Center. “It’s a fabrication being peddled, for personal and political gain, by leaders who should know better.”
