House's SAVE Act Vote Shows Who Benefits from Fraud
Why vote against a law to enforce existing law unless you want people to break that law?
The recent vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on legislation to prevent states from allowing noncitizens to vote in federal elections is a highly significant event. In particular, it indicates which party perceives that it benefits from illegal votes. You are alloted one guess as to which one it is.
Some states currently allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, and proponents of the bill argued that the federal government should ensure these persons ineligible to vote in federal elections cannot do so.
The proposed law would require prospective voters to provide proof of citizenship to register for federal elections. Those include elections to the presidency, vice presidency, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation also directs the states to remove noncitizens from the voter registration rolls for federal elections.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act passed 221-198, with five Democrats voting yes. AP made sure to name all five Democrats. The “news” service did not publish their home addresses, though I am sure that the editors really wanted to.
The Committee to Unleash Prosperity posted that list as well, but it also published “the shameful list of 198 Democrats who are opposed to proof of citizenship for voting in federal elections.” Not nearly as many people will see that list as will see the other, of course.
The media’s spin on this bill is that it is unneeded and is solely intended “as an election-year talking point even as research shows noncitizens illegally registering and casting ballots in federal elections is exceptionally rare” and “part of a broader and long-term Trump campaign strategy of casting doubt on the validity of an election should he lose,” as AP put it:
The majority of Democrats and voting rights advocates have said the legislation is unnecessary because it’s already a felony for noncitizens to register to vote in federal elections, punishable by fines, prison or deportation. Anyone registering must attest under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen. Noncitizens also are not allowed to cast ballots at the state level. A handful of municipalities allow them to vote in some local elections.
The argument that the bill is superfluous because illegal voter registration is already illegal is an obvious sophistry. The bill is meant to make sure states enforce the law. Somehow the opponents of the legislation seem to have overlooked that.
“Even though it’s already illegal, this is happening,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.
Republicans note that illegal votes reduce the value of legal ones, AP reported after providing the opposition arguments (which one might think a biased editorial decision; I’ll leave it to you to decide):
Republicans who support the bill contend the unprecedented surge of migrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border creates too large a risk of noncitizens slipping through the cracks and casting ballots that sway races in November.
“Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a legal American citizen,” said Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the Republican chair of the House Administration Committee.
The “mainstream” media outlets made sure to lead their stories with the claim that “research shows noncitizens illegally registering and casting ballots in federal elections is exceptionally rare,” as AP stated.
I have my doubts about the credibility of that research, as I think any reasonable person would. As this item I’m writing is a commentary and not a news story, I am free to add my opinion that the real reason for opposing this bill is a desire to protect every possible means of enabling the accumulation of phony votes in states across the country.
It is noteworthy that ease of voter registration and “harvesting” of ballots are the Left’s sole priority in managing “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections.” Making sure that only eligible individuals vote is no concern whatsoever.
Accordingly, the SAVE Act “would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls,” the Biden administration stated.
“House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., said in a ‘Whip Question’ sent to House Democrats that because of the act’'s proof of citizenship requirement, it ‘would prevent Americans from registering to vote with their drivers’ license alone,” The Center Square accurately reported. Bill sponsor Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) “disputed that, arguing Democrats oppose it ‘because they WANT non-citizens, including illegals, to vote,’” the news organization added.
Making voter registration easier means making phony registration easier, too. One might suppose that this is mere coincidence or an unfortunate unintended consequence. I do not.
There have in fact been numerous reports of voter registration numbers exceeding the count of people eligible to vote in various places. In California, for example, the Election Integrity Project found that the state had 1.8 million more registered voters than the number of eligible citizens, with 23 counties showing “more registered voters than eligible,” and “there [were] almost 124,000 more votes counted in California’s November 3, 2020 election than voters recorded as voting in that election,” the California Globe reported in 2021. The number of ineligible voter registrations in California nearly doubled in just four years:
California is a one-party state, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans by more than three- to- one in the State Assembly and four- to- one in the state Senate. Perhaps that is mere happenstance.
Source: Wikipedia
In 2017, the United States had “3.5 million more registered voters than live adults,” commentator Deroy Murdock reported in National Review at the time. Murdock found “462 counties where the registration rate exceeded 100 percent,” by analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011-2015 American Community Survey and statistics from the federal Election Assistance Commission collected by Judicial Watch.
Some counties have startling numbers of falsely registered voters, Murdock noted:
These 462 counties (18.5 percent of the 2,500 studied) exhibit this ghost-voter problem. These range from 101 percent registration in Delaware’s New Castle County to New Mexico’s Harding County, where there are 62 percent more registered voters than living, breathing adult citizens—or a 162 percent registration rate.
Washington’s Clark County is worrisome, given its 154 percent registration rate. This includes 166,811 ghost voters. Georgia’s Fulton County seems less nettlesome at 108 percent registration, except for the number of Greater Atlantans, 53,172, who compose that figure.
But California’s San Diego County earns the enchilada grande. Its 138 percent registration translates into 810,966 ghost voters. Los Angeles County’s 112 percent rate equals 707,475 over-registrations. Beyond the official data that it received, Judicial Watch reports that LA County employees “informed us that the total number of registered voters now stands at a number that is a whopping 144 percent of the total number of resident citizens of voting age.”
All told, California is a veritable haunted house, teeming with 1,736,556 ghost voters.
Murdock found large amounts of falsely registered voters in what were then battleground states:
‐ Colorado: 159,373
‐ Florida: 100,782
‐ Iowa: 31,077
‐ Michigan: 225,235
‐ New Hampshire: 8,211
‐ North Carolina: 189,721
‐ Virginia: 89,979
In Virginia, a “James Madison University student was sentenced to prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to registering dead voters for the Democratic Party during the 2016 election,” the Washington Examiner reported in 2017. “Spieles worked as a Democratic campaign operative during its voter registration drive, and admitted that he prepared the false voter registration forms by obtaining the name, age, and address of individuals from ‘walk sheets’ provided to him by the Virginia Democratic Party,” the paper reported.
In Indiana that same year, AP reported, “Twelve employees of a Democrat-linked group focused on mobilizing black voters in Indiana are accused of submitting fake or fraudulent voter registration applications ahead of last year’s general election in order to meet quotas, according to charging documents filed Friday.” As in the Virginia case, a political party was behind the illegal scheme: “The Indiana Voter Registration Project’s effort to register primarily black voters was overseen by Patriot Majority USA, which has ties to the Democratic Party, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and former President Bill Clinton.”
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, of course, have embraced voter registration with a passion, directing their entire administration to assist in packing the nation’s voter rolls. With that in mind, Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales (a Republican) “warned more than 120 federal agencies operating in Indiana against providing voter registration services described in a three-year-old presidential executive order without state approval” earlier this month, according to the Greenfield Daily Reporter.
On the other side of the political aisle, a Georgia GOP official was fined $5,000 for voting while on “extended probation in connection with a pair of felony convictions dating back nearly 30 years” in Pennsylvania, NBC News reported.
To explore the subject further and draw your own conclusions about the two major parties’ election fraud habits, the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database provides a highly useful “sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country,” each of which “ended in a finding that the individual had engaged in wrongdoing in connection with an election hoping to affect its outcome—or that the results of an election were sufficiently in question and had to be overturned.”
Many proponents of easier voter registration probably want nothing more than to help little old ladies cross the street to the voting booth. Many others, however, clearly want to use ease of voter registration to enable themselves to “find” enough votes to win every election. There is no logical reason to dismiss the existence of the latter or even to posit that their motives do not dominate that movement.
Of course, the SAVE Act will not make it through the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate, and Biden would veto it should it somehow land on his desk (which will not happen anyway, as I said). That does make the legislation essentially a formality.
It does not, however, make the legislation unnecessary.