Alabama made a big splash this summer when Secretary of State Wes Allen announced he’d found 3,251 names on his state’s voter rolls that he suspected of being illegal immigrants and had them moved to the inactive voter list.
But things quickly began to unravel.
A little more than a month after notices went out, more than 700 of the people came forward to confirm they were, in fact, eligible citizens. In some cases, they were citizens from birth. In other cases, they naturalized but the state was operating under older records, causing many false positives in Alabama’s purge.
Meanwhile, just 106 of the people the state flagged actually requested their names be removed, and the federal Justice Department said even that isn’t proof they were noncitizens.
A federal judge eventually stepped in and ordered the state to restore the other voters to active status.
What was supposed to be a smoking gun for those who see noncitizens as a threat to elections turned into a major misfire.
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Yet even as that fiasco was playing out, federal prosecutors in Alabama announced they had snared one noncitizen — an illegal immigrant, no less — who’d been registered and even cast ballots in 2016 and 2020.
Angelica Maria Francisco, a 42-year-old Guatemalan woman, admitted in her plea agreement that she was living here under a U.S. identity she stole in 2011 and which she used to register to vote in 2016. She would go on to cast ballots illegally in 2016 and 2020.
The cases are two sides of the same coin.
Ms. Francisco’s case is proof positive that some noncitizens do, in fact, vote in U.S. elections. But Alabama’s attempted purge shows the risk of overestimating the issue.
“I don’t know the number except I can tell you I’m nearly 100% certain nationwide the number of noncitizens that may be on the voter lists is below 10,000, and nationwide the number of noncitizens that actually vote is at most measured in the dozens, and probably less,” said David Becker, who runs the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
Purges
Under federal law, voting in federal elections is restricted to citizens.
Former President Donald Trump has argued that noncitizens are signing up and turning out in numbers that skew election results, and Alabama and other mostly GOP-led states responded by perusing their rolls to see who turned up.
Over several weeks this summer, Alabama revealed its purge; Ohio announced it had spotted about 600 noncitizens on its rolls; Texas counted 6,500 potential noncitizens, of whom 1,830 had cast ballots in previous elections; and Florida reported culling 144 noncitizens from its lists in August.
In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in August that his state had pulled 6,300 names of noncitizens from its rolls between January 2022 and July of this year. He ordered officials to keep scouring the rolls through Election Day. As of mid-October, they had pulled roughly 1,600 more names — until a federal judge put a halt to it and ordered the names restored.
Virginia has asked the Supreme Court to get involved.
Even Oregon, a deep blue state, announced it had removed more than 1,200 names from its rolls for not providing proof of citizenship — though officials said last month they were still working to figure out if those people were all ineligible or whether some mistake had been made.
Georgia, a state Mr. Becker describes as the gold standard for registering voters, also went looking through its 8.2 million strong list of voters. It came up with just 20 noncitizen names.
Then there are states like California, where election officials seem bemused that anyone would even think to ask about noncitizens on their rolls.
“We don’t have any data to report on instances of non-citizens voting or being incorrectly registered and removed from the voting rolls,” the secretary of state’s office said in response to The Washington Times.
That’s because the state just isn’t looking, said J. Christian Adams, head of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
PILF released a report this week that studied Alameda County in California and found 54 people who had been registered but later canceled because they admitted they weren’t citizens.
In some cases, Alameda approved the registrations even though the applicants provided foreign countries as their places of birth and even checked the “No” box when asked if they were U.S. citizens.
In one case, a woman showed up to vote in 2016 and cast a provisional ballot where she marked that she wasn’t a citizen. But it wasn’t until 2018 that election officials canceled her registration after she “came to [the] office with documentation.”
“They just don’t give a rip,” Mr. Adams said. “We actually probably know more about noncitizen voting in California than the secretary of state does.”
At root, the dispute is about where the law should tilt when it comes to voting. Democrats’ stance errs on the side of allowing every possible vote, with the resulting risk that some ineligible voters’ ballots get counted too.
Republicans’ stance, meanwhile, could exclude some valid voters even as it works to block those who shouldn’t be voting.
Which is why the extent of noncitizen voting is so critical. If it’s a small number, Democrats likely have the better argument. If it’s a bigger problem, the GOP’s arguments make more sense.
Mr. Becker, a former voting rights lawyer at the Justice Department, said states should be able to accommodate both perspectives.
“That’s a false choice,” he said. “It is entirely possible, given technology we have, for states to do a better job of registering almost all of their eligible citizens, those that want to be registered, and to flag and remove people who aren’t eligible.”
He also discounted some of the more extreme theories, such as attributing the illegal immigrant surge to Democrats’ desire to import new fraudulent voters.
“No one is crossing through the Darien Gap to cast one ballot in an election in which 160 million ballots are being cast. And if they do, they’re highly likely to be caught, jailed and deported,” he said. “If Democrats’ big plan is to import waves of immigrants so they can vote in the 2036 election, you’ve got to tip your hat to them.”
Legal trouble
The cases that have come to light indicate that the bigger issue is legal immigrants.
That became apparent thanks to some fascinating work by federal prosecutors in North Carolina during the Trump administration. They brought cases against roughly three dozen noncitizens who not only registered but cast ballots in the 2016 election.
Nearly every one of the cases involved a legal immigrant, and court documents shed unprecedented light on how they came to be registered.
One told authorities he was pushed to register when he went to a food pantry. Another was signed up when he accompanied his girlfriend to sign up for food stamps. A third said he was pressured by a poll worker to sign up while he was accompanying a friend who was registering. Still another said she signed up after hearing then-President Obama encourage all immigrants to vote. And another said she signed up because the immigration officer who granted her green card said she could “do anything a United States citizen can do.”
She had voted in elections and primaries from 2004 to 2016.
Mr. Adams said those stories were typical. He estimated that about 90% of noncitizens who end up on the rolls are here legally but haven’t attained citizenship.
Census Bureau research dating back to the Trump administration shows that legal immigrants sometimes don’t know — or are afraid to report — that they aren’t citizens.
In 2018, as part of a push to add a citizenship question to the decennial count, the bureau did an analysis of surveys that already asked about citizenship. It then ran those against other government data. The bureau found that in about 30% of cases, immigrants inaccurately marked that they were citizens.
“I’m not sure what it means, but it does point to significant confusion about citizenship among a large share of noncitizens,” said Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies. “That has implications for registration and voting.”
“There’s no question noncitizens register to vote and vote. The question has always been how big and does it matter. This kind of analysis shows it could matter,” he said.
In North Carolina, the noncitizen voters cast 99 ballots in elections spanning decades.
They spanned racial and ethnic lines. And registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a 3-1 ratio.
Mr. Adams said that’s true nationwide.
“It’s sort of a fluke when you see ones that are registered Republican,” he said. “It’s only a question of whether it’s 2-1 or 7-1.”
He also discounted the notion of a mass effort to recruit fraudulent voters.
“If this was a conspiracy to get all these noncitizens in the system, this would be an easier nut to crack. But because it’s organic and discrete events, it’s harder to fix,” said Mr. Adams, who served as a voting rights lawyer in the Justice Department.
States who want to clean their rolls face some hurdles, not least of which is trouble getting the feds to cooperate.
A group of red-state attorneys general wrote a letter earlier this month to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas saying his department has stymied efforts to run names by the government’s Person Centric Query Service database.
The department has told the states the database is not “appropriate” for their needs, the state officials said, but they insisted that’s not Mr. Mayorkas’ decision to refuse.
“DHS’s statutory mandate to provide information to the States does not depend on DHS’s view on how useful that information may be,” they wrote.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit this month asking a federal judge to order the feds to help.
“Defendants refuse to comply with law and answer valid requests for information from the Attorney General of Texas and the Secretary of State of Texas for the citizenship status of the over 450,000 people on Texas’s voter rolls for whom the State cannot verify their citizenship status using existing sources.” the lawsuit said.
House Republicans are pursuing legislation that would enforce better cooperation, but that bill has met resistance from Democrats.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.