A demonstration in favor of the SAVE act. New York Post/Getty.
The Department of Homeland Security has found 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in four states. New York Post. The majority of these registrations were in California, with 191,000, but New Jersey (35,000), Nevada (16,000) and Pennsylvania (14,500) had many as well. It is unclear how many of those non-citizens actually voted and if they had any impact on any major races. It's a felony for a non-citizen to register to vote, though it's up to the states to confirm if the voter has a right to vote. The revelation was one of many revealed during President Trump's speech tonight on election security.
My Comment:
I missed President Trump's speech tonight by accident, so I didn't see what he had to say about this, so this post will mostly be about the non-citizen voter issue. Trump also talked about China stealing US election data, major vulnerabilities in voting machines and inaccurate voter rolls. The non-citizen voter issue is the one that had numbers attached to it, as of this writing, so it's a little easier to analyze.
To be clear, it's not proven that all of these people voted in elections. Some of these numbers may be mistakes, things like naturalized citizens data not getting updated, so I would expect that the numbers are a little bit better than they are.
That doesn't mean that this is acceptable in any way. Even one illegal vote taints an entire election, and even if you managed to eliminate 90% of these voters as not actually being illegal, you have enough illegal votes to change outcomes of close races.
Even more concerning is the fact that two of these states, Pennsylvania and Nevada, are swing states that could have entire presidential elections swing based on 10,000 to 15,000 illegal votes. And while New Jersey and California aren't swing states, they still have House districts, senate races and local elections too. And even New Jersey could potentially be a swing state in future elections, given how close Republicans have gotten in the past few elections.
It's pretty clear that some of these votes could have changed election results in a few races. The margins might not be enough to overturn who won which states in 2020 or 2024, but they absolutely could have flipped congressional districts or even Senate races.
And we don't know how bad the problem is. It's very possible that more voters are registered illegally in these states, and maybe more will be found. Worse still, this is only 4 states out of 50, who knows how bad this problem is in other states, most notably swing states? Even if the problem isn't much worse in other states, it could mean we have a million illegal voters. That's totally unacceptable.
I do think that the SAVE act, currently stalled out in the legislative branch, could solve much of these issues. If you have to prove citizenship while registering to vote, which the SAVE act would mandate, it's almost impossible, without a huge effort to get fraudulent documents, to register illegally. It might not entirely eliminate the problem, but it would get rid of most of it.
Either way, I do think it's pretty clear that folks don't trust our elections. Indeed, the people complaining about Trump pointing out that our election security is garbage, foreign citizens are registered to vote, and that China may have been attempting to influence or interfere with the election, are hugely hypocritical. Indeed, Trump's entire first term was about how he supposedly colluded with Russia to beat Clinton (which was false, but the accusation was made).
The problem now is that both sides in America are only really going to trust elections when they win (and even then, I still don't trust them). Reform is absolutely necessary to bring back faith in our elections. The things we want are common throughout the rest of the civilized world, and even countries as dysfunctional as India (!!!) are able to get their election results in a day. It's absolutely time for America to step up and fix our elections.
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