The vast majority of likely voters say illegal immigrants should not be allowed to vote, despite a recent push to achieve just that in New York City, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll.
According to Rasmussen, 67 percent of likely U.S. voters say illegal immigrants should not be allowed to vote, even "if they can prove that they live in this country and pay taxes." Twenty-six percent said they think tax-paying illegals should be allowed to vote.
This most recent poll represents a shift away from the opinion that illegal immigrants' voices should be counted in elections. Last May, when Rasmussen posed the same question, 60 percent said they would oppose allowing tax-paying illegal immigrants to vote and 35 percent said illegal immigrants should be allowed to vote.
The poll question comes as New York City officials are weighing a proposal that would open local elections up to illegal immigrants.
According to the survey, 71 percent of likely U.S. voters oppose allowing illegal immigrants vote for local officials in their communities. Another 19 percent are in favor of the idea, and 10 percent are undecided.
Republicans are most likely to oppose illegals voting with 80 percent rejecting the prospect, followed by independents with 70 percent opposing.
Several well-funded organizations - including the League of Women Voters and the NAACP - are fighting efforts to prevent non-citizens from voting illegally in the upcoming presidential election. And the United States Department of Justice, under the direction of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, is helping them.
On February 12, these groups filed a lawsuit in D.C. federal court seeking to reverse a recent decision by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The Commission's decision allows Kansas and other states, including Arizona and Georgia, to enforce state laws ensuring that only citizens register to vote when they use a federally designed registration form. An initial hearing in the case is set for Monday afternoon, February 22.
Under federal law, the EAC is responsible for designing the federal voter-registration form required by the National Voter Registration Act, or Motor Voter, as it is commonly called. While states must register voters who use the federal form, states can ask the EAC to include instructions with the federal form about additional state registration requirements. Some states are now requiring satisfactory proof of citizenship to ensure that only citizens register to vote.
Under Article I, Secion 2 and the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, states have the power to set the "Qualification requisite for electors." As with many issues, the Left disdains the balance the Framers adopted in the Constitution and objects to this delegation of power to the states. They prefer to see power over elector eligibility centralized in Washington, D.C.
So when Arizona sought to include citizenship-verification requirements with voter-registration forms, the institutional Left - including the League of Women Voters, People for the American Way, Common Cause, Project Vote, and Chicanos for La Causa - brought a lawsuit claiming that the EAC hadn't approved such requirements. Incredibly, this fight over whether states can ensure that only citizens are voting went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2013 in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, a divided Court said that Arizona could not implement such a requirement unless and until the EAC agreed to change the instructions for use of the federal form to include the Arizona requirements.
The New York Post is reporting that some members of the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus will be pushing for the New York City Council to pass a law allowing illegal aliens to vote in NYC elections for mayor, comptroller, public advocate, borough president, and City Council. This is an anti-democratic policy driven by politics that dilutes what it means to be a citizen.
The U.S. Constitution reserves the right to set the qualifications for voters for both state and federal elections to the states themselves. However, the federal government has exclusive authority over immigration, and federal law makes it a felony for aliens-whether illegal or legal-to register or vote in federal elections. Every state has also banned aliens from voting in state elections, although a handful of jurisdictions like Takoma Park, Maryland, allow aliens to vote in local elections. Despite the federal prohibition, it looks as though the Obama administration's Department of Justice is trying to prevent states from verifying the eligibility of voters by requiring proof of citizenship to register.
On the other hand, the Guarantee Clause, Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, does state that "[t]he United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government[.]" Allowing someone outside the political community to vote would raise serious questions about whether state electoral procedures would be unrepublican and thus be unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court, however, has ruled in Luther v. Borden (1849) that this clause in the Constitution is a "political question" and thus is adjudicated not by the federal courts, but by the rough-and-tumble of politics.
Assuming state law allows NYC to permit illegal aliens to vote in local elections, doing so is extremely unwise.
As a practical matter, this policy would encourage bad governance by NYC politicians. Specifically, city policies that provide handouts from the tax-paying legal citizen base to the illegal alien voting bloc would become more attractive. This policy would also encourage politicians to turn a blind eye toward the flouting of our nation's immigration laws. This sort of disrespect for the rule of law has serious consequences.
Most importantly, this policy would raise serious questions about the democratic legitimacy of the NYC government. Allowing illegal aliens to vote effectively disenfranchises legitimate voters by diluting their votes. While allowing illegal aliens to vote might play well to certain interest groups and to affluent liberal voters, the interests of ordinary New Yorkers who oppose this policy (who pay the taxes and do the work that runs the Big Apple) will be sacrificed.
Diluting the votes of ordinary citizens of New York City is fundamentally unfair. It encourages contempt for both the law and our election process.
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How Noncitizens Can Swing Elections (Without Even Voting Illegally) Hans von Spakovsky /
In an article in Politico, Mark Rozell, acting dean of the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University, and Paul Goldman, a weekly columnist for the Washington Post, point out a fact that should greatly concern all Americans: that the presence of millions of noncitizens, both legal and illegal, could tilt the presidential election toward the Democrat Party and decide the election in favor of the eventual Democratic nominee.
Voter Fraud Happens
As I have outlined in many different articles and a recent book on voter fraud, illegal voting by noncitizens is a growing problem. Most election officials are not taking the steps necessary to detect or stop it, and many prosecutors including the current Justice Department seem reluctant to prosecute it.
A study released in 2014 by three professors at Old Dominion and George Mason Universities in Virginia concluded that 6.4 percent of the noncitizen population voted illegally in the 2008 election, enough to have changed the outcome of various contests in a number of states.
That includes the winner of North Carolina's electoral votes, which went to Barack Obama by a relatively small margin, since a majority of foreign-born residents favor the Democratic Party. That may also be why Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the governor of a battleground state, vetoed a bill that would have required jury commissioners to provide local election officials with the names of individuals called for jury duty from the state's voter registration list who were excused for not being U.S. citizens.
Some States Have Congressional Districts They Shouldn't Have
But as Rozel and Goldman accurately point out, noncitizens may be changing the outcome of presidential elections even without voting illegally. This is related to the problem of some states having more representatives in Congress than they should, and others being shortchanged unfairly due to the huge-and growing-population of illegal aliens whom the Obama administration and its political allies want to provide permanent amnesty.
All of this stems from the way apportionment is conducted. There are 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Under Sec. 2 of Article I of the Constitution and Sec. 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, every ten years, after the "Enumeration" (the Census), we redistribute those 435 seats based on the "whole number of persons in each State." In other words, the number of members of the House that each state gets is based on the total population of each state relative to the total population of the U.S., which includes noncitizens. Thus, the upwards of 12 million illegal aliens present in the U.S., combined with other aliens who are here legally but are not citizens and have no right to vote, distort representation in the House.
