Obama has "back-doored" quasi-amnesty -- any questions why? He is counting on a large turnout of illegal aliens in 2012! They can't vote, you say? They do vote, and they vote by the thousands!

In 2005, the U.S.
Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the
30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration rolls
over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S.
citizens. While that may not seem like many, just 3 percent of
registered voters would have been more than enough to provide the
winning presidential vote margin in Florida in 2000. Indeed, the Census
Bureau estimates that there are over a million illegal aliens in
Florida, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has prosecuted more
non-citizen voting cases in Florida than in any other state.

Florida is not unique. Thousands of non-citizens are registered to
vote in some states, and tens if not hundreds of thousands in total may
be present on the voter rolls nationwide. These numbers are significant:
Local elections are often decided by only a handful of votes, and even
national elections have likely been within the margin of the number of
non-citizens illegally registered to vote.

Yet there is no reliable method to determine the number of
non-citizens registered or actually voting because most laws to ensure
that only citizens vote are ignored, are inadequate, or are
systematically undermined by government officials. Those who ignore the
implications of non-citizen registration and voting either are willfully
blind to the problem or may actually favor this form of illegal voting.

Americans may disagree on many areas of immigration policy, but not
on the basic principle that only citizens—and not non-citizens, whether
legally present or not—should be able to vote in elections. Unless and
until immigrants become citizens, they must respect the laws that bar
non-citizen voting. To keep non-citizens from diluting citizens’ votes,
immigration and election officials must cooperate far more effectively
than they have to date, and state and federal officials must increase
their efforts to enforce the laws against non-citizen voting that are
already on the books.

An Enduring Problem

Costas Bakouris, head of the Greek chapter of Transparency
International, says in an interview that ending corruption is easy:
enforce the law. Illegal voting by immigrants in America is nothing new.
Almost as long as there have been elections, there have been Tammany
Halls (a Democrat political machine!)trying to game the ballot box. Well into the 20th century, the
political machines asserted their ascendancy on Election Day, stealing
elections in the boroughs of New York and the wards of Chicago. Quite
regularly, Irish immigrants were lined up and counted in canvasses long
before the term “citizen” ever applied to them—and today it is little
different.

Yet in the debates over what to do about the 8 million to 12 million
illegal aliens estimated to be in the United States, there has been
virtually no discussion of how to ensure that they (and millions of
legal aliens) do not register and vote in elections.(Perhaps the federal government should stop paying organizations like ACORN to register them!)

Citizenship is and should be a basic requirement for voting.
Citizenship is a legal requirement to vote in federal and state
elections, except for a small number of local elections in a few
jurisdictions.

. . . .

The evidence is indisputable that aliens, both legal and illegal, are
registering and voting in federal, state, and local elections.
Following a mayor’s race in Compton, California, for example, aliens
testified under oath in court that they voted in the election. In that
case, a candidate who was elected to the city council was permanently
disqualified from holding public office in California for soliciting
non-citizens to register and vote. The fact that non-citizens registered
and voted in the election would never have been discovered except for
the fact that it was a very close election and the incumbent mayor, who
lost by less than 300 votes, contested it.

Similarly, a 1996 congressional race in California may have been
stolen by non-citizen voting. Republican incumbent Bob Dornan was
defending himself against a spirited challenger, Democrat Lor­etta
Sanchez. Sanchez won the election by just 979 votes, and Dornan
contested the election in the U.S. House of Representatives. His
challenge was dismissed after an investigation by the House Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform turned up only 624 invalid votes by
non-citizens who were present in the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) database because they had applied for citizenship, as
well as another 124 improper absentee ballots. The investigation,
however, could not detect illegal aliens, who were not in the INS
records.

The Oversight Committee pointed out the elephant in the room: “If
there is a significant number of ‘documented aliens,’ aliens in INS
records, on the Orange County voter registration rolls, how many illegal
or undocumented aliens may be registered to vote in Orange County?”
There is a strong possibility [I would say "probability!] that, with only about 200 votes
determining the winner, enough undetected aliens registered and voted to
change the outcome of the election. This is particularly true since the
California Secretary of State complained that the INS refused his
request to check the entire Orange County voter registration file, and
no complete check of all of the individuals who voted in the
congressional race was ever made.

The “Quick Ticket”

Non-citizen voting is likely growing at the same rate as the alien
population in the United States; but because of deficiencies in state
law and the failure of federal agencies to comply with federal law,
there are almost no procedures in place that allow election officials to
detect, deter, and prevent non-citizens from registering and voting.
Instead, officials are largely dependent on an “honor system” that
expects aliens to follow the law. There are numerous cases showing the
failure of this honor system.

The frequent claim that illegal aliens do not register in order “to
stay below the radar” misses the fact that many aliens apparently
believe that the potential benefit of registering far outweighs the
chances of being caught and prosecuted. Many district attorneys will not
prosecute what they see as a “victimless and non-violent” crime that is
not a priority. [False: The victims are American citizens who have the effect of their votes diluted by votes of those who are not only non-citizens, but are in this country illegally! Does anyone wonder why it is that Democrats, liberals, and the ACLU fight so vehemently against voter ID laws?]

On the benefit side of the equation, a voter registration card is an
easily obtainable document—they are routinely issued without any
checking of identification—that an illegal alien can use for many
different purposes, including obtaining a driver’s license, qualifying
for a job, and even voting. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of
1986, for example, requires employers to verify that all newly hired
employees present documentation verifying their identity and legal
authorization to work in the United States. In essence, this means that
new employees have to present evidence that they are either U.S.
citizens or legal aliens with a work permit. The federal I-9 form that
employers must com plete for all new employees provides a list of
documentation that can be used to establish identity—including a voter
registration card.

How aliens view the importance of this benefit was illustrated by the
work of a federal grand jury in 1984 that found large numbers of aliens
registered to vote in Chicago. As the grand jury reported, many aliens
“register to vote so that they can obtain documents identifying them as
U.S. citizens” and have “used their voters’ cards to obtain a myriad of
benefits, from social security to jobs with the Defense Department.” The
U.S. Attorney at the time estimated that there were at least 80,000
illegal aliens registered to vote in Chicago, and dozens were indicted
and convicted for registering and voting.

The grand jury’s report resulted in a limited cleanup of the voter
registration rolls in Chicago, but just one year later, INS District
Director A. D. Moyer testified before a state legislative task force
that 25,000 illegal and 40,000 legal aliens remained on the rolls in
Chicago. Moyer told the Illinois Senate that non-citizens registered so
they could get a voter registration card for identification, adding that
the card was “a quick ticket into the unemployment compensation
system.” An alien from Belize, for example, testified that he
and his two sisters were able to register easily because they were not
asked for any identification or proof of citizenship and lied about
where they were born. After securing registration, he voted in
Chicago.

Once such aliens are registered, of course, they receive the same
encouragement to vote from campaigns’ and parties’ get-out-the-vote
programs and advertisements that all other registered voters receive.
Political actors have no way to distinguish between individuals who are
properly registered and non-citizens who are illegally registered.

A Failure to Cooperate

Obtaining an accurate assessment of the size of this problem is
difficult. There is no systematic review of voter registration rolls by
states to find non-citizens, and the relevant federal agencies—in direct
violation of federal law—refuse to cooperate with state election
officials seeking to verify the citizenship status of registered voters.
Federal immigration law requires these agencies to “respond to an
inquiry by a Federal, State, or local government agency, seeking to
verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any
individual within the jurisdiction of the agency for any purpose
authorized by law, by providing the requested verification or status
information,” regardless of any other pro vision of federal law, such as
the Privacy Act.

However, examples of refusal to cooperate are legion:

– In declining to cooperate with a request by Maryland to check the
citizenship status of individuals registered to vote there, a spokes man
for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) mistakenly
declared that the agency could not release that information because “it
is important to safeguard the confidentiality of each legal immigrant,
especially in light of the federal Privacy Act and the Immigration and
Nationality Act.”(I find it not only
amazing but distressing that an agency of the federal government will
not assist a state in checking the citizenship of individuals registered
to vote in that state!)

One surprising result of this policy: In 2004, a guilty verdict in a
murder trial in Maryland was jeopardized because a non-citizen
was discovered on the jury—which had been chosen from the voter rolls.

– In 2005, Sam Reed, the Secretary of State of Washington, asked the
CIS to check the immigration status of registered voters in Washing ton;
the agency refused to cooperate.

– A request from the Fulton County, Georgia, Board of Registration
and Elections in 1998 to the old Immigration and Naturalization Service
to check the immigration status of 775 registered voters was likewise
refused for want of a notarized consent from each voter because of
“federal privacy act” concerns.

– In 1997, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Dallas were
investigating voting by non-citi zens. They sent a computerized tape of
the names of individuals who had voted to the INS requesting a check
against INS records, but the INS refused to cooperate with the criminal
investigation. An INS official was quoted as saying that the INS
bureaucracy did not “want to open a Pandora’s Box…. If word got out that
this is a substantial problem, it could tie up all sorts of manpower.
There might be a few thou sand [illegal voters] in Dallas, for example,
but there could be tens of thousands in places like New York, Chicago or
Miami.”

These incidents show that the CIS and U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), the successor agencies to the INS, are either igno
rant of federal legal requirements or deliberately ignoring them. An
inquiry by a state or local election official regarding voter
eligibility based on citizenship falls squarely within their statutory
authority.

To be sure, CIS and ICE databases are not comprehensive; they contain
information only about legal immigrants who have applied for the
documentation necessary to be in the United States and illegal
immigrants who have been detained. But even access to that information
would be a big step forward for election officials in their attempts to
try to clean up registration lists and find those aliens who are
illegally registered and voting in elections.

The Honor System

The refusal of federal agencies to obey the law compels local election
officials to rely almost en tirely on the “honor system” to keep
non-citizens from the polls. As Maryland’s state election administrator
has complained, “There is no way of check ing…. We have no access to any
information about who is in the United States legally or otherwise.”

Most discoveries of non-citizens on the registration rolls are
therefore accidental. Though the Department of Justice has no procedures
in place for a systematic investigation of these types of criminal
violations, in just a three year period, it prosecuted and convicted
more than a dozen non-citizens who registered and voted in federal
elections in Alaska, Florida, the District of Columbia, and Colorado.
Among them was an alien in southern Florida, Rafael Velasquez, who not
only voted, but even ran for the state legislature. Eight of the 19
September 11 hijackers were registered to vote in either Virginia or
Florida—registrations that were probably obtained when they applied for
driver’s licenses.

In 1994, Mario Aburto Martinez, a Mexican national and the assassin
of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, was found to
have registered twice to vote in California. A random sample of just 10
percent of the 3,000 Hispanics registered to vote in California’s 39th
Assembly District by an independent group “revealed phony addresses and
large numbers of registrants who admitted they were not U.S. citizens.”
This problem may be partially explained by the testimony of a Hispanic
member of the Los Angeles Police Department who had been a volunteer for
the California-based Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.
When she reported to her supervisor that her fellow volunteers were not
asking potential voters whether they were citizens, she was reprimanded
“and told that she was not to ask that question…only whether the person
wished to register to vote.” Similarly, the Dornan–Sanchez investigation
produced an affidavit from a non-citizen stating that the Sanchez
campaign’s field director, an elected member of the Anaheim Board of
Education, told him that it “didn’t matter” that he was not a U.S.
citizen—he should register and vote anyway.

In 2006, Paul Bettencourt, Voter Registrar for Harris County, Texas,
testified before the U.S. Committee on House Administration that the
extent of illegal voting by foreign citizens in Harris County was
impossible to determine but “that it has and will continue to occur.”
Twenty-two percent of county residents, he explained, were born outside
of the United States, and more than 500,000 were non-citizens.
Bettencourt noted that he cancelled the registration of a Brazilian
citizen in 1996 after she acknowledged on a jury summons that she was
not a U.S. citizen. Despite that cancellation, how ever, “She then
reapplied in 1997, again claiming to be a U.S. citizen, and was again
given a voter card, which was again cancelled. Records show she was able
to vote at least four times in general and primary elections.”

In 2005, Bettencourt’s office turned up at least 35 cases in which
foreign nationals applied for or received voter cards, and he pointed
out that Harris County regularly had “elections decided by one, two, or
just a handful of votes.” In fact, a Norwegian citizen was discovered to
have voted in a state legislative race in Harris County that was
decided by only 33 votes. Nor is this problem unique to Harris County.
Recent reports indicate that hundreds of illegal aliens
registered to vote in Bexar County, Texas, and that at least 41
of them have voted, some several times, in a dozen local,
state, and federal elections.

In 2005, Arizona passed Proposition 200, which requires anyone
registering to vote to provide “sat­isfactory evidence of United States
citizenship,” such as a driver’s license, a birth certificate, a pass
port, naturalization documents, or any other docu ments accepted by the
federal government to prove citizenship for employment purposes. The
state issues a “Type F” driver’s license to individuals who are legally
present in the United States but are not citizens. Since
Proposition 200 took effect, 2,177 non-citizens applying for such
licenses have attempted to register to vote. Another 30,000 have been
denied registration because they could not produce evidence of
citizenship.

The constitutionality of Arizona’s requirement is currently being
litigated in federal court.(Unbelievable - someone is arguing that it is unconstitutional to require proof of citizenship before being allowed to vote! The Supreme Court already decided this issue in favor of the state of Indiana on challenges to its voter ID law.) The district court hearing the case refused
to issue a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the law, and
the Supreme Court vacated a preliminary injunction issued by the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals. Trial is scheduled for July 2008. The
plaintiffs will have to convince the presiding judge that the very same
proof of citizenship required by the federal government before an
individual can work is somehow unlawful when imposed by a state before a
person can vote.

Some non-citizen registrations can be detected through the jury
process. The vast majority of state and federal courts draw their jury
pools from voter registration lists, and the jury questionnaires used by
court clerks ask potential jurors whether they are U.S. citizens. In
most states, however, and throughout the federal court system, court
clerks rarely notify local election officials that potential jurors have
sworn under oath that they are not U.S. citizens. In jurisdictions that
share that information, election officials routinely discover
non-citizens on the voter rolls. For example, the district attorney in
Maricopa County, Arizona, testified that after receiving a list of
potential jurors who admit ted they were not citizens, he indicted 10
who had registered to vote. (All had sworn on their registration forms
that they were U.S. citizens.) Four had actually voted in
elections. The district attorney was investigating 149 other
cases.

The county recorder in Maricopa County had also received inquiries
from aliens seeking verification, for their citizenship applications,
that they had not registered or voted. Thirty-seven of those aliens had
registered to vote, and 15 of them had actually voted. As the county’s
district attorney explained, these numbers come “from a relatively small
universe of individuals—legal immigrants who seek to become citizens….
These numbers do not tell us how many illegal immigrants have registered
and voted.” Even these small numbers, though, could have been enough to
sway an election. A 2004 Arizona primary election, explained the
district attorney, was determined by just 13 votes. Clearly,
non-citizens who illegally registered and voted in Maricopa County could
have deter mined the outcome of the election.

These numbers become more alarming when one considers that only a
very small percentage of regis­tered voters are called for jury duty in
most jurisdictions. The California Secretary of State reported in 1998
that 2,000 to 3,000 of the individuals sum moned for jury duty in Orange
County each month claimed an exemption from jury service because they
were not U.S. citizens, and 85 percent to 90 percent of those
individuals were summoned from the voter registration list, rather than
Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records. While some of those
individuals may have simply committed per jury to avoid jury service,
this represents a significant number of potentially illegal voters:
20,400 to 30,600 non-citizens summoned from the voter registration list
over a one-year period.

Helping Aliens Vote

Under the Constitution, an individual’s eligibility to vote is left
mostly to the states. Article I and the 17th Amendment provide that the
electors for Members of Congress shall have the qualifications for
electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislatures. Article
II provides that presidential electors shall be chosen in the manner
directed by state legislatures. All of the states require voters to be
U.S. citizens to vote in state elections, and 18 U.S.C. § 611 makes it a
crime for “any alien to vote in any election held solely or in part for
the purpose of electing a candidate for the office of President, Vice
President, Presidential elector,” or Congress.

Other federal laws authorize the Justice Department to prosecute
non-citizens for registering and voting in elections. The National Voter
Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) requires individuals registering to
vote to affirm eligibility requirements, including citizenship. The Help
America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) added a specific citizen ship question
to the federal voter registration form. Since citizenship is clearly
material to a voter’s eligibility, aliens can be prosecuted for
providing false registration information and voting under the NVRA. They
can also be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 1015(f), which criminalizes
making a false statement or claim about citizenship “in order to
register to vote or to vote in any Federal, State, or local election
(including an initiative, recall, or referendum),” and under 18 U.S.C. §
911, which prohibits making a false claim of citizenship.

The NVRA has contributed to the problem of aliens registering to
vote. The largest source of voter registrations are state programs
created under Section 5 of the NVRA, known as “Motor Voter,” which
requires all states to allow individuals who apply for a driver’s
license to register to vote at the same time. States such as Maryland,
Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington allow
illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses, and other states, such as
Tennessee, provide licenses to resident aliens.

To comply with Motor Voter, states automatically offer voter
registration to all applicants for a driver’s license. Most government
employees do so even when they know the applicants are not citizens
because these employees do not want to face claims that they
discriminated based on ethnicity, and they believe it is the
responsibility of election officials, not state DMVs, to determine the
eligibility of voter registration applicants. Yet when license bureaus
submit completed registration forms to state election officials, they
often omit the citizen ship status of the applicants.

. . . .

Confusion still reigns in the states. In 2004, a Maryland state
legislator contacted the DOJ to express his concern that the Maryland
Department of Motor Vehicles was allowing non-citizens apply ing for
driver’s licenses to register to vote. When he asked the DMV to stop, he
was told that it was required by the NVRA to offer all driver’s license
applicants the opportunity to register to vote. The Justice Department
quickly sent the Maryland delegate a letter pointing out that the NVRA
had no such requirement and that federal law makes it a crime for a
non-citizen to register. The letter went on to say that a state that
issues licenses to non-citizens should not offer such an individual the
right to register to vote. Nonetheless, there is no evi dence that the
Maryland DMV has changed its procedures to deter non-citizens from
registering, and Maryland officials recently testified that they were
issuing 2,000 driver’s licenses per week to undocumented aliens.

Utah, which issues licenses to illegal aliens, switched to a
two-tiered system that issues a visibly different “driving privilege”
card to illegal aliens after a limited 2005 audit by the state’s
Legislative Auditor General. The audit found that hundreds of illegal
aliens had registered to vote when they obtained their Utah driver’s
licenses—and at least 14 of them had voted. The audit used a small
sample; Utah State Senator Mark Madsen said that an extrapolation of the
audit numbers suggested that 5,000 to 7,000 aliens were registered to
vote.

This problem has been exacerbated by many states’ interpretation of a
HAVA provision that requires a citizenship question on the federal
mail-in voter registration form. The provision, in 42 U.S.C. § 15483,
requires the following question: “Are you a citizen of the United States
of America?” If an applicant fails to answer this question, HAVA
provides that the local election official must notify the applicant of
the failure and “provide the appli cant with an opportunity to complete
the form in a timely manner to allow for the completion of the
registration form” prior to the election. Under the threat of lawsuits
by organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, states such as
Ohio, Iowa, and South Dakota will register an individual even if he
fails to answer the citizenship question. The Justice Department so far
has failed to sue these states to force compliance with HAVA.

. . . .

Practical Solutions

There are several changes that states and the fed eral government can
and should make to prevent non-citizens from registering and voting
illegally in state and federal elections:

–Congress and state legislatures should require all federal and state
courts to notify local election officials when individuals summoned for
jury duty from voter registration rolls are excused because they are not
United States citizens. United States Attorneys are already under a
similar obligation: Under the NVRA, they must send information on felony
convictions to local election officials so that the felons can be
removed from voter registration rolls.

– All states should require anyone who registers to vote to provide
proof of U.S. citizenship. This requirement should be identical to the
fed eral requirement of proof for employment.

– ICE and CIS should comply with federal law and confirm the
citizenship status of registered voters when they receive requests for
such information from state and local election officials. If the
agencies decline to do so, they should be investigated by Congress and
the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for
their failure to follow the law.

– The database, known as E-Verify, that is being used by U.S.
employers to check the citizenship status of prospective employees
should be made available to election officials and administrators of the
statewide registration databases required by HAVA so that election
officials can run data base comparisons to identify registered voters
who are not citizens.

– The DOJ should file enforcement actions against all states that
allow an individual to register to vote when he or she has not answered
the citizenship question on the voter registration form required by
HAVA.

– Local district attorneys must be made to realize that registration
and voting by non-citizens are offenses against the basic principles of
our democratic system and that such cases must be prosecuted. CIS and
ICE should also realize that all information they have on non-citizen
voting—such as when immigrants applying for citizenship admit they have
registered and voted or when illegal aliens who are detained are found
to possess voter registration cards or other documents indicating they
are registered to vote—must be referred to the DHS for institution of
removal proceedings, to the DOJ for prosecution, and to the relevant
election officials so that the individual can be struck from the
registration rolls.

– The DOJ should conduct a survey of all state DMVs to determine
which ones have rules and procedures in place that prevent non-citizens
who apply for driver’s licenses from registering to vote and then file
enforcement actions against any state that refuses to comply with this
requirement.

–A voter registration card should not be a valid identifying document
to obtain a driver’s license or employment.

. . . .

Election officials have an obligation not only to enforce those laws,
but also to implement registration and election procedures that do not
allow those laws to be bypassed or ignored. Anything less encourages
contempt for the law and our election process. Lax enforcement of
election laws permits individuals who have not entered the American
social compact or made a commitment to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. laws,
and the U.S. cultural and political heritage to participate in
elections and potentially change the outcome of closely contested races
that affect how all Americans are governed.