After telling Meet the Press viewers that non-citizen voting is “exceedingly rare” and “already against the law,” NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger what he thought about “efforts to prevent non-citizens from voting.”
“I believe only American citizens should be voting in our elections,” replied Raffensperger. “I’m the first secretary of state in Georgia to ever do 100 percent citizenship verification,” adding that Georgia officials discovered “about 1600 people that attempted to register, but we couldn’t verify citizenship, so they weren’t put on the voter rolls.”
The Secretary also explained that his office “just won a court case which came from the left, the Coalition of the People’s Agenda and the New Georgia Project, which was founded by Stacey Abrams.”* Raffensperger points out that the lawsuit “tried to stop us from doing citizenship verification before people were put on the voter rolls.”
“Good news, good news for everyone,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson chided, dismissively. “All of us want to make sure only U.S. citizens are voting in our elections. And all of us follow the law, ensure the federal provisions are protected, and that we’re ensuring that only valid votes are counted in our state.”
Democrat Benson reiterated that “regardless of our party affiliation, we’re doing all that we can and more to ensure, as the facts show, in all of our states, that only U.S. citizens are voting.”
“What you just said there was ‘federal provisions,’” responded Raffensperger, noting that non-citizens have been given the vote — legally — at the local level in a number of states.
He argued that states should place in their constitutions “that only American citizens are voting in any election in your state.”**
Still, Welker inquired, “Is it a red herring?”
No, Raffensperger answered, arguing that “already there’s the left-wing groups trying to get noncitizens voting in local elections in Washington, D.C., New York City and in other places.” And he asked, “Why are we getting sued by the left to stop us from doing citizenship verification?”
Many Democrats and much of the media continue to dodge such questions.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*In her first run for Governor, Abrams said her “blue wave” was “comprised of those who are documented and undocumented” and specifically acknowledged that she “wouldn’t oppose” allowing non-citizens to vote at the local level.
** Americans for Citizen Voting has worked closely with the Georgia Secretary of State to place such constitutional amendments on six state ballots this November: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. North Carolina may soon become the seventh state to do so.
Illustration created with ChatGPT 40 and Midjourney
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5 replies on “The Non-Citizen Dodge”
It’s reasonable to say that only US citizens should be voting in US — that is, federal — elections.
It is reasonable to say that only citizens of Georgia should be voting in Georgia’s state elections.
It is reasonable to say that only citizens of Peoria should be voting in Peoria’s city elections.
It is not reasonable to demand that the US government get to decide who’s a citizen of Georgia, or that the Georgia government get to decide who’s a citizen of Atlanta. They’re separate polities. The US government has no more business deciding who’s a citizen of Georgia or a citizen of Atlanta than it has deciding who’s a citizen of Belgium or a citizen of Madrid.
While the United States is a federation, the constituent states are not federations of counties, nor are the counties federations of cities, towns, and unincorporated areas, and these smaller divisions are not in turn federations of neighborhoods.
And these same people wonder why so many Americans have little or no faith in the integrity of the election process. In-person registration should be the norm. If you’re able to get up and move to a different location, registering to vote should be on your to-do list at the new address.
Curiously, several hundred thousand registered voters on the voter rolls that have not had any contact by the Secretary of State’s office in the last 10 years.
And despite the positive self-congratulatory tone of the Secretary of State’s office report, they failed to mention that the voter rolls are only examined and cleaned in the first 6 months of odd-numbered years. So it has been OVER a year since the rolls have been looked at. Plenty of time to be loaded up with registrations by foreign nationals, who are automatically registered to vote when getting a Georgia driver’s license, unless they opt out. Plenty of time for hostile hackers to load the voter rolls with fake registrations by loading in duplicate voters with one data point changed (like having their sex designation changed). Creates a huge reservoir of fake names to be loaded onto harvested absentee ballots. Enough to steal an election, if one were inclined. Then the hackers could come back and purge the computer records of the fake duplicates.
Not saying that happened, but that is a simple explanation for the missing 380,761 ballot images that Fulton County lawyers could not explain to the Board in the last State Election Board meeting.
Occam’s razor.
An examination of the integrity of the election process in Georgia and specifically of the vulnerabilities of the Dominion voting machines might very well lead to serious, uncomfortable questions on the veracity of the election results that yielded Raffensperger as the winner in the Secretary of State election. He was only at 39% in the polls going IN to the election yet supposedly garnered enough swing voters to even avoid a runoff.
Raffensperger has too much of a conflict of interest to make believable decisions or pronouncements on the election integrity in the state of Georgia.