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| AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato |
Hundreds of noncitizens have been kicked off Chicago’s voter rolls after admitting they were never supposed to have been registered in the first place, according to a new study that blames the Motor Voter Act for how the names got added in the first place.
Since 2007, the city has removed 394 people from its voting lists after deciding they were actually foreign nationals who, under the law, are ineligible to vote.
City records show that 20 of the noncitizens did actually vote, casting a total of 85 ballots, according to data compiled by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
That includes one person who stayed on the rolls for 30 years until the record was canceled.
The chief cause of the illegal registrations is Motor Voter Act, the nickname for 1993’s National Voter Registration Act. The idea was simple: Get more people signed up to vote by pushing them to register when they used a government service like obtaining a driver’s license.
Backers claimed success, as the voter rolls did jump.
But it also meant people who had no business registering also ended up on the lists.
The Motor Voter Act turned 30 earlier this month and PILF said it is “showing signs of wear.”
“It has led to more transparency and federally mandated voter list maintenance of deceased and duplicate registrants. Unfortunately, it has led to thousands of foreign nationals registering to vote,” said PILF President J. Christian Adams. “Congress must update Motor Voter to fix this vulnerability in our elections.” --->READ MORE HERE
Illegal immigrants and other noncitizens should not be voting in U.S. elections . Alas, too many do.
When Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana led Republican opposition to what was nicknamed the “Motor Voter” bill in 1993, he dubbed it “Auto Fraudo." Thirty years to the week after President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, it seems an apt monicker, according to a May 23 report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
As PILF rightly argued, the Motor Voter law needs to be modified and updated. Its guarantees for greater transparency should be kept or even strengthened, and its loopholes allowing fraud should be closed.
The new report, the most recent in a series of PILF studies from across the country, showed that in the past 20 years in Chicago, 394 noncitizens were registered to vote despite properly telling election officials they were not citizens. Of those, 20 cast a total of 85 ballots in real elections. The average length of time that noncitizens stayed on the voter rolls before errors were caught was 7 1/2 years. One noncitizen was on the rolls for 30 years!
It’s bad enough for these incidences to occur, but the numbers must substantially understate the problem. The report covers only those noncitizens who self-reported their status but were registered against Illinois law and arguably against the U.S. Constitution. Incentives weigh overwhelmingly against self-reporting, so it stands to reason that many multiples of the reported numbers are on Chicago's voter rolls. --->READ MORE HERE
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