More than a dozen jurisdictions run by Democrats — including Washington, D.C., and several adjacent Maryland municipalities — allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. San Francisco not only permits noncitizens to vote but appointed one to serve on its elections commission.
Such developments, against a backdrop of millions of illegal migrants streaming into the United States under the Biden-Harris administration, bring new urgency to debates over election integrity. Many Republicans fear that a widespread effort is afoot to give noncitizens the full benefits of citizenship, including the right to vote in all elections, on top of benefits already available to illegal aliens in some places, notably driver’s licenses, food stamps, government health care, and work visas.
Although Democrats note that noncitizens may not participate in federal elections and claim there is little evidence noncitizens are voting unlawfully, critics are unmollified.
A RealClearInvestigations analysis of proposed and enacted state and federal laws, along with other reporting and research, suggests that the fight over noncitizen voting is only likely to intensify this year — both in the immediate wake of an expected closely contested presidential election and in its aftermath.
States across the country report that thousands of noncitizens have been discovered on voter rolls in the past decade, with unknown numbers already having voted:
Pennsylvania found 11,000 registrants suspected of being noncitizens after becoming aware of a decades-old “glitch” in the state’s “motor voter” registration system in 2017. It removed 2,500 individuals from the rolls, and it could not verify the citizenship status of the other 8,700 registrants. Virginia
