by Natalia Mittelstadt
“Washington, D.C., other municipalities around the country, not only allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections, they’re actually using taxpayer dollars to encourage non-citizens to participate in our elections,” Rep. Bryan Steil said. There's not much time left to resolve this nationwide problem.
With the November election fewer than six weeks away, states and localities are cleaning up voter rolls and sending out ballots to voters. However, multiple jurisdictions are experiencing issues in preparation for Election Day.
As voters in some states have already begun the early and absentee voting process, several jurisdictions have recently found problems in the administrative process, such as non-citizens on voter rolls and duplicate ballots sent out to voters.
Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., chairman of the House Administration Committee that oversees elections, told the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show on Tuesday that one of the most important issues in this election cycle is non-citizens voting.
“Washington, D.C., other municipalities around the country, not only allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections, they’re actually using taxpayer dollars to encourage non-citizens to participate in our elections,” Steil said.
Washington, D.C.’s law states that “an individual residing in our nation's capital for simply 30 days is eligible to vote,” he explained. “So someone working at the Russian embassy who's a Russian citizen, if they've resided in Washington, D.C., for 30 days, they can walk down to the polling station this November and vote in the municipal elections.”
“Now it's illegal on paper for somebody to vote in a U.S. election at the federal level. That said, it's illegal to cross the border, yet millions of people do it. This is about enforcement, about preventing individuals from taking illegal action,” Steil added.
Non-citizens have been found on states’ voter rolls, with many states removing them upon discovery. However, non-citizen voting is not the only election integrity issue that Steil said is important to focus on, and most Democrats oppose reforms for such problems.
“This is what's so frustrating – when we have an opportunity to increase Americans' confidence in the elections, what we continue to see are liberal Democrats pushing back against very common-sense reforms,” Steil said. “It's the same pushback that we saw when Democrats pushed back against photo ID. Photo identification when you go to the polls is an absolute no-brainer.”
Below is a list of 12 states and jurisdictions across the country that are struggling with election-related issues:
Alabama
Earlier this month, an illegal immigrant agreed to plead guilty to charges of having stolen a U.S. citizen's identity to illegally vote in multiple U.S. elections and illegally obtain a passport, according to the Justice Department. That illegal immigrant registered to vote in Alabama in 2016 and voted in the 2016 and 2020 primary and general elections. Last month, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen instructed county boards of registrars to remove 3,251 people from active voter rolls and to set their registrations as inactive over their citizenship status.
Arizona
Last week, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) said that nearly 98,000 voters were incorrectly registered in the state as providing proof of U.S. citizenship, even though they had not done so. In April 2023, PILF reported that Maricopa County, Ariz., records showed that since 2015, 222 foreign nationals were removed from the county’s voter rolls, with nine of them recorded as casting 12 ballots across four federal elections. According to a February report by PILF, Pima County has removed 186 non-citizens from its voter rolls since 2021, with the majority of those registered to vote through third parties.
Georgia
Last month, the Georgia State Election Board voted to request that state Attorney General Chris Carr reopen an investigation into Fulton County's counting of the results of the 2020 election after an independent investigation found that the county likely scanned thousands of ballots twice in a recount of the 2020 election. The board has also requested that its own executive director investigate how the boards of elections in eight counties have handled challenges to voter registrations. The counties are Athens-Clarke, Cobb, DeKalb, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Jackson, and Macon-Bibb.
Iowa
Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird (R) charged a non-citizen last week with illegally voting in a July city council election.
North Carolina
The North Carolina State Board of Elections removed 747,000 individuals from state voter rolls over the past 20 months because they were ineligible for registration.
Ohio
In May, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) directed all 88 counties to begin a removal process for non-citizens on Ohio's voter rolls after 137 voter registrations were found of non-citizens who had twice confirmed their lack of U.S. citizenship. Also, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wrote a letter on Friday demanding Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas respond to LaRose’s requests to DHS for federal citizenship information to make sure Ohio voters are U.S. citizens.
Oklahoma
A total of 456,309 voter registrations have been removed from Oklahoma's voter rolls since 2021.
Oregon
Oregon removed 1,259 voters this month from state voter rolls who were registered to vote without proof of U.S. citizenship due to errors made by the motor vehicles department.
Pennsylvania
The Pennsylvania Department of State announced in September 2017 that records indicated 1,160 non-citizens since 1972 had requested their voter registrations be canceled.
Texas
Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced that more than 1 million ineligible voters have been removed from voter rolls since 2021.
Illinois
According to a PILF report from May 2023, Chicago records show that 394 foreign nationals were removed from the city’s voter rolls since 2007, with 20 of them recorded as casting 85 ballots.
Wisconsin
In Madison, Wis., 2,215 duplicate ballots mistakenly went out to voters. The U.S. Department of Justice sued two rural Wisconsin towns after they switched from including electronic voting machines to using only paper ballots in their elections and counting them by hand.
Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., said Thursday on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show on that the city of Madison should take more precautions to ensure that duplicate ballots aren’t counted.
“They're saying, the city of Madison, ‘we're going to go to all 2,215 of these voters, and we're going to make sure that they know about this.’ What they need to do is get a hold of the duplicate ballot and make sure that it's not cast. Because remember, in Madison, in Dane County, that is the center of the universe in Wisconsin for the ballot harvesting efforts of Democrats. We have to make sure this election is above repute, especially in one of the most critical states in this upcoming election: Wisconsin,” Tiffany said.
"A mistake was made, the Clerk's Office moved swiftly to rectify the error and reassure voters, but there is NO possibility of a duplicate absentee ballot being counted," Madison spokesperson Dylan Brogan told Fox News on Wednesday.
Natalia Mittelstadt
Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/top-12-jurisdictions-discovering-election-issues-ahead-november
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