Loophole allows illegal immigrants to vote

If only U.S. elections were overseen with the integrity of a professional boxing match, then all might be well. Before a boxing match begins, the referee summons the fighters to mid-ring, warns them against blows below the belt, demands a clean fight, then sends them to their neutral corners with the wish that the best man win.

Boxing’s guidelines would represent noble goals for the 2024 presidential election. No more unmonitored drop boxes, no more harvesting ballots that have forged signatures, no more no-excuse absentee early mail-in voting, no more unsupervised polling places, no more malfunctioning electronic vote tallying machines and no more counting ballots days after Election Day.

Florida, for example, proves how smoothly an Election Day counting deadline works. The state requires absentee votes to be tabulated as the ballots arrive, as early as 22 days before Election Day. As a result, Florida, for several consecutive elections, has announced the undisputed and therefore uncontroversial results within hours after the polls close.

Even the liberal New York Times acknowledges that late counting raises fraud and error issues. Let the best man, Biden or Trump, win a clean, uncontested victory — no cheating allowed.

The questionable practice of no-excuse early voting has exploded since, in the 1980s, California allowed its residents to request absentee ballots for any reason including their personal convenience. Since then, 23 states and the District of Columbia have adopted no-excuse ballots.

Using COVID-19 as justification, 32% of voters cast absentee ballots in 2020, often in drop boxes. Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Utah now distribute all their ballots by mail. These ongoing threats to truly democratic voting have cast serious doubt about the United States’ election integrity.

A 2019 report published by the Electoral Integrity Project, an independent undertaking based at Harvard University, found that on the integrity scale, U.S. elections from July 2012 through December 2018 rated “lower than any other long-established democracies and affluent societies.”

Analysts gave each country in the index a score out of 100 possible points based on their assessments of the quality of each of its elections — including categories such as electoral laws, voter registration and its voting process.

The U.S. scored 61, the same as Mexico and Panama, and is the second-lowest among liberal democracies and also is much lower than other countries in the Americas region, including Costa Rica, Uruguay and Chile. For comparison,  Denmark, Finland and Norway are among the top-ranked countries, all with scores in the 80s.

Critics point to an even greater danger than the above listed perils that will invalidate American citizens’ votes. Based on the latest available data, the nonpartisan organization Just Facts found that about 10% to 27% of  the Census Bureau’s recorded 19 million illegal immigrant adults living in the U.S. in 2022 are registered to vote. About half of them — 5% to 13% — “will illegally vote in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections.”

Two Ph.D.’s who specialize in data analytics peer reviewed Just Facts’ research and concluded that it was “methodologically sound.” These figures are potentially high enough to overturn the will of the American people in major elections, including congressional seats and the presidency.

An important footnote to the Just Facts research: the 19 million illegal immigrant population in 2022 is an undercount, and in 2024, two more years into President Joe Biden’s open borders agenda, the migrant population including gotaways could be, experts estimate, 30 million or more.

But in the ultimate below-the-belt punch to democracy, the federal code provides a legal loophole for noncitizens to vote. After listing the fines and possible one-year prison sentence for illegal aliens who vote in federal elections, 18 U.S. Code 611 – Voting by Aliens, concludes by confirming that penalties will not apply if: “the alien reasonably believed at the time of voting in violation of such subsection that he or she was a citizen of the United States.”

Once the illegal alien casts his ballot, it’s included in the final count. But in the highly unlikely event that a poll worker questions the illegally cast vote, the foreign national could say something like, “Of course, I’m a citizen. The White House invited my family and me to the U.S. Your government paid for my journey into the interior, gave me food and shelter, granted me parole and issued me work permission.”

Voters have repeatedly heard that a handful of ballots will decide the November election. Election officials in states across the nation will mail or hand-deliver hundreds of thousands of those potentially deciding ballots to nursing homes and to deceased but voting people where they will be harvested.

Ballots will also be sent to homes where illegal immigrants reside, possibly under the false assumption that they are citizens. If disregard for free and fair elections in America continues, the nation’s integrity score will soon be on par with Venezuela’s.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org .

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