Virginia purged 1600 non-citizens from their voter rolls and a Chinese student actually voted in Michigan. Clearly requiring citizenship to register as a voter is not sufficient. Poll volunteers should be verifying citizenship.
> “Governor Youngkin has been clear: every eligible Virginia citizen who wants to vote can do so by Same Day Registering through Election Day—that’s what our law says,” said Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez.
> A “final failsafe,” Martinez added, is the ability for residents to use same day registration to vote early or on Election Day.
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/politics/us-citizens-caught-i...
How do you reconcile that with:
Senate Republicans block border security bill as they campaign on border chaos ( May 24, 2024 )
Nearly every GOP senator, along with six Democrats, voted to filibuster a bipartisan bill designed to crack down on migration and reduce border crossings.
The vote caps a peculiar sequence of events after Senate Republican leaders insisted on a border security agreement last year and signed off on a compromise bill before they knifed it. Democrats, wary of their political vulnerability when it comes to migration, had acceded to a variety of GOP demands to raise the bar for asylum-seekers and tighten border controls.
FWiW I'm not American, and it seems pretty clear that US Republicans vastly overhype the risks associated with the southern border, campaign hard on fear mongering, and tank any efforts by the Democrats to address those problems.
Politically it's a common conservative tactic having been used in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere.
What's curious is how people seem to fall for this and just accept what they're fed w/out looking into details.
Much like the "Inflation Reduction Act" which was a clean energy bill that had nothing to do with inflation, the bill did the exact opposite of what it claimed.
- It funded billions of dollars for the NGOs which were aiding illegal immigration
- It normalized and allowed historically high illegal levels of immigration (10x normal)
- It removed the standard process for adjudicating asylum by judges and made it part of the federal ICE
- Required the US to fund lawyers for all people who were charged with illegal immigration (12 million in the last 4 years)
- It gave $60 billion to Ukraine, 3x more than border security [1]
- It gave $14 billion to Israel, $10B to Gaza, $2B for conflicts in the Red Sea, $4B to Taiwan
During this period where 12 million (3.4% of US population) people have crossed the border for residency illegally, many of which have been flown in by the US federal government, the federal government has sued Texas repeatedly while they are trying to build a border wall. They have flown in percentages of whole populations to US swing states to try to build voters. And illegal immigrants count in the census which determines US electoral votes.
The reason the GOP voted against it is because it was a wishlist for the Democratic party. There is nothing more complicated about it than that. If the GOP was such fear mongers, as you say, they'd vote for a bill that ameliorated their concerns.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-unveils-118-billi...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/436...
I'll bet money that none of the changes are grouped into any sort of easy-to-digest format with cross-referencing and other mechanisms to make it easy for people to introspect it.
I am happy to see that the entirety of responses are effectively 'lol, actually read the law it is a disaster'.
My heart grew 1 size today.
"What's curious is how people seem to fall for this and just accept what they're fed w/out looking into details." Pot, meet Kettle.
This whole system is easy to maintain if you've had it in place. However, it's very hard to emit ID cards for a whole population that hasn't had one before. I'm not suggesting this is an easy fix for the USA, even beyond the cultural issues that would arise if trying to do a federal ID for every citizen like this.
This is where it gets confusing for me because your comment makes me think that people can’t agree on whether it’s a more serious mistake to allow an ineligible person to vote or whether we end up stopping (hopefully temporarily) an eligible voter from exercising their right.
If just an ID is used, how do they confirm someone is a citizen? Can you only get an Illinois ID if you are eligible to vote?
In the case of a state without voter ID, there is no check — you literally just have to bring an electric bill. A non citizen could easily vote. It would be illegal, but the odds of being caught are slim to none.
If there was a suspicion that the voter was illegal, a poll worker could have them cast a provisional ballot. In places like California, it is a felony to require a provisional ballot without evidence.
But, as I've noted elsewhere, while this is an option in VA, it isn't in all states (the same-day reg part - they all have some form of provisional ballot). And it creates friction and uncertainty among the electorate. If your state sent you a letter that said you were ineligible, would you jump through hoops to prove them wrong, or would you punt this cycle and fix the issue later? The latter is what the GOP hopes will happen, effectively disenfranchising a specific group of left-leaning voters (most immigrant groups lean left to some extent).
Edit to add - states that have RealID implemented (not sure if they all do yet), all the paperwork required to get the RealID stamp on your DL would prove your citizenship as well, so that's on record with the state. In the case of the 1600 voters in VA, they all have pre-RealID licenses (and many have naturalized in the time since their DL was issued). But, quite a few were selected erroneously based on scant evidence.
Over the last 20 years there's no record of a non citizen voting in VA.
As a poll worker myself, there's nothing we would check election day that was that wasn't already checked during registration. Asking me to "verify" day of, beyond what we already do, isn't really feasible.
Recommend you work the polls and educate yourself on how your particular locale operates.
If a state is allowing intelligible people to register to vote that's a much, much bigger issue and one that can't be solved by poll workers.
And purging them within 60 days of the election is illegal per federal statute.
Youngkin and the GOP are flat out wrong here. The courts have said as much so far. And yet here we are again having to explain all this to somebody who watches too much Fox News.