This seems to be the month of top Idaho elected officials warning about, and offering decisive action, on a serious problem ... that doesn’t exist.
I’m making no argument that noncitizens should vote in public elections in this country. I don’t think they should. (If you want to vote in Germany or India, become a citizen of those countries.)
The problem is, this just isn’t a big problem, as much as some public officials and media celebrities try to drive people into a froth over it.
Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch (with some of their colleagues) on July 12 were “demanding answers from U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to prevent aliens from registering to vote in American elections.”
They noted the substantial number of people crossing our border (that much is true; quite a few are) and then said, “Plainly, there are opportunities for and instances of non-citizen voter registration, and so the critical question is whether the laws against doing so are being enforced by your Department. There appear to have been few prosecutions by your Department under these laws, and there is no indication that you have been pursuing cases in places like Georgia and Ohio where aliens have been caught registering or voting.”
First, we know that the states and not the federal government run elections, so what exactly the DOJ is remiss in doing is unclear.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable.” If after a lot of years of searching for the evidence no one has been able to prove it’s happening, you might have to stop to consider that there might be a reason. Johnson’s debunked intuition aside, there have been few identifiable cases in the nation, ever.
For one thing, a 1996 law specifically has barred noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
Noncitizen voting is allowed only in the District of Columbia and in some cities in three states: California (San Francisco and Oakland, where it applies only to school elections), Maryland and Vermont — but only in specified local elections.
In Idaho, where Republican Party leaders have — without any evidence — more than once spoken of truckloads of noncitizens crossing the border to vote in Idaho elections, Gov. Brad Little and Secretary of State Phil McGrane have joined the chorus.
On July 9, the governor signed “the ONLY CITIZENS WILL VOTE Act.” It is harmless enough: It mostly calls for coordination and reports. But the language describing it is breathless.
“Idaho already has the most secure elections in the nation, and we’re going to keep it that way. My executive order — the ONLY CITIZENS WILL VOTE Act — directs Secretary of State Phil McGrane to work with local county clerks to scrub our voter rolls and make sure Idaho’s elections do not fall prey to the consequences of Biden’s lawless open border,” Gov. Little said.
McGrane: “Across Idaho’s 44 counties, we have excellent mechanisms in place already to ensure non-citizens do not vote in Idaho, but there is always more we can do to make sure only citizens will vote. I am proud to work closely with Governor Brad Little to put in place a plan that keeps Idaho ahead of the pack in election integrity.” Shorter: We don’t have a problem in this area.
Nor do other states. Only a few states have reported more than a tiny, stray number of noncitizens either registering to vote or actually voting. The most substantial case is in Georgia, where in 2022 the secretary of state reported “1,634 cases of potential noncitizens registering to vote in Georgia.” However, most of them seem to have registered to vote in error — they thought they were in a long bureaucratic line to do something else — and none of them actually voted.
Federal District Judge Fred Biery in Texas remarked of his state’s efforts on the subject, “This is a solution looking for a problem.”
He’s right.
Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor who blogs at ridenbaugh.com. He may be contacted at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com.
