A Republican-led House panel elevated growing concerns on Tuesday about noncitizens registering to vote in battleground states and advocated stricter laws to prevent that from happening.
Republicans invited three witnesses to testify during a hearing on the matter, and all of them validated worries from the Right that noncitizens will find ways to vote illegally in the 2024 election.
Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd appeared before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government and said his state has purged about a million people from its voter rolls since 2022. Byrd said a portion of those people were noncitizens.
“This isn’t a fake or contrived issue,” Byrd said.
Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting, but another witness during the hearing, the Immigration Accountability Project’s Rosemary Jenks, identified holes in the federal legal system that she said could be exploited by noncitizens or those hoping to register them.
Jenks pointed to two pieces of legislation, the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, also known as the “Motor Voter Act,” and the 2002 Help America Vote Act.
Passage of these two bills made it “virtually impossible to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote, either accidentally or intentionally,” Jenks said.
All 50 states have mechanisms for issuing driver’s licenses to noncitizens who are living in the United States legally, and noncitizens who live in the U.S. with some form of government-issued work authorization can, at times, eventually obtain Social Security numbers.
“The Biden-Harris administration has been handing out work authorization documents like candy to inadmissible aliens with SSN issuances following close behind,” Jenks said. “So, we have federal voter laws that do not require proof of citizenship to register to vote combined with a massive population of noncitizens with valid driver’s licenses and SSNs.”
Ranking member Mary Scanlon (D-PA) was the lone Democrat of the six on the subcommittee to participate in the hearing. She repeatedly bashed the topic of noncitizens voting as a “propaganda campaign” and a “lie” and noted that known instances of noncitizens actually voting are “extremely rare.”
Former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are raising alarm over noncitizen participation in elections “to set the stage to challenge the 2024 election results” if Trump loses, Scanlon said.
There are several well-documented instances of states, including not just Florida but also Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, and others, purging thousands of noncitizens from their voter rolls in recent years. Studies indicate that these noncitizens’ registrations materializing into votes is rare.
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) questioned why a lack of proof of a widespread occurrence of noncitizens voting should be a “reason not to guard against it.” Bishop’s question comes as a majority of House Republicans push to address the looming government funding deadline by attaching to a short-term spending bill the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act to require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote. Such documentation is currently not required to register to participate in federal elections using a federal form.
Cleta Mitchell, a veteran conservative lawyer and senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, presented a counterpoint to Democrats who frequently point to noncitizen voting being illegal and the rare nature of it.
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“Yes it is [illegal], and it is also illegal for millions of people to swarm across our borders without documentation,” Mitchell said, blasting the Biden administration for failing to prevent millions of migrants from entering the country illegally.
She also speculated that some Democrats could lack an appetite for preventing noncitizens from voting because, “for Democrats, noncitizens are their future political base.”
