Listen to “Are Non-Citizens Voting in Texas?” on Spreaker.
Texas officials say they found 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote and believe as many as 58,000 cast ballots in the state. More investigating needs to be done to determine how many of those people became citizens after registering, but one election law experts believes this is simply the tip of the iceberg.
“I think what they’re going to find is that a large percentage of these individuals were, in fact, not U.S. citizens when they registered to vote,” said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation.
He says other evidence proves this is more than a hunch.
“Federal reports indicate that the majority or folks who register to vote do so when they go to a state driver’s license bureau and get a license. So I think they’re probably going to find that a very large number of these 95,000 individuals registered to vote at the very same time that they went in to get a driver’s license as a legal non-citizen,” said von Spakovsky
State official will now be asking county officials in Texas to look at each of those possible non-citizen voters to determine if they are now citizens and were citizens when they registered and when many of them voted.
Von Spakovsky says this revelation does not surprise him at all.
“It’s no surprise because it just complements the other evidence that has been found from many other states across the country that non-citizens are illegally registering and voting,” said von Spakovsky, noting that California now automatically registers anyone to vote when they come in to get a driver’s license.
Listen to the full podcast to hear von Spakovsky explain why he believes red and blue states will have very different reactions regardless of the final conclusions in Texas, why some political leaders seem to have no interest in making sure only eligible citizens are voting in their jurisdictions, and how he sees an effort to blur the distinction between citizens and non-citizens.