ID Archives - Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Question: What stops the California Assembly from allowing noncitizens to vote in federal elections?

Answer: Nothing.

Noncitizens are now voting in two major California cities: San Francisco and Oakland. Legally. Including those in the country illegally.

And California courts have upheld the constitutionality, after San Francisco’s law was challenged.

Voting in the Golden State doesn’t have to be limited to U.S. citizens.

So, it’s not all that far-fetched to think California’s legislature might one day pass a statute allowing noncitizens to vote in state legislative elections. Maybe in Maryland, too, where 16 cities now have legal and illegal aliens voting. Or Vermont, where a legislative supermajority overrode the governor to say yes to three cities giving the vote to noncitizens. Legislation has been introduced in both New York and Connecticut, in recent years, to give noncitizens the vote in those states’ legislative elections.

“The Constitution is clear,” law professor Bradley Smith wrote Monday in The Wall Street Journal, “Under Article I and the 17th Amendment, any person who is allowed to vote in a state legislative election is automatically also allowed to vote for members of Congress.”

In other words, the federal statute that purports to ban noncitizen voting in federal elections has a hole in it big enough to drive, say, the state of California through.

“A federal statute can’t trump the Constitution’s explicit, exclusive grant of power to each state to determine who is eligible to vote,” explained the professor.

. . . “even if the SAVE America Act were passed. . . .

“Although no state allows noncitizens to vote for its legislature,” Smith said, “that could change.”

We need a constitutional amendment in this 250^th year of our Republic because only citizens of the United States should vote in federal elections. Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) just introduced it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

The Five Million Fix

Thanks to its analyses of voter rolls and numerous lawsuits, Judicial Watch can now report that, over the last several years, about five million names have been struck from voter rolls in almost a dozen states and localities.

These names unlawfully appeared on the rolls because of invalid voter registrations, as validity is defined in the National Voter Registration Act Of 1993.

According to the Act, each application to register “must state each voter eligibility requirement (including citizenship), contain an attestation that the applicant meets each requirement, state the penalties provided by law for submission of a false voter registration application and require the signature of the applicant under penalty of perjury.”

Thanks to Judicial Watch, 735,000 ineligible names have been removed from Kentucky voter rolls since 2019; 918,139 ineligible names have been removed from New York City voter rolls since 2022; and over a million ineligible names have been removed from the voter rolls of Los Angeles County.

These efforts have also led to the removal of ineligible names from the voter rolls of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, and outside of LA in California.

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the organization. In Maryland, for example, the State Board of Elections promulgated a rule to criminalize the use of registration lists to investigate voter fraud. A district court ruled that the rule violated the law.

Voter fraud is a problem, and it hasn’t been fixed yet. Thanks to Judicial Watch for making a big dent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts