After Obama’s Amnesty, Illegal Aliens Could Decide U.S. Elections
President Obama’s recent executive orders granting provisional legal status to an estimated 5 million illegal aliens will likely allow an indeterminate number of them to cast ballots in elections across the United States — and it’s hard to see how it won’t affect the outcome of some number of close elections.
Amnestied illegal aliens are now eligible to receive Social Security numbers and, in many cases, drivers’ licenses. Since the vast majority of states don’t require individuals to present proof of citizenship to either register or vote, and given the Obama administration’s zealous promotion of motor-voter registration and declared refusal to enforce Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (ensuring that only eligible individuals vote), it’s certain that appreciable numbers of amnestied illegal aliens will be able to vote.
Furthermore, testimony last week before the House Judiciary Committee revealed that under Obama’s amnesty some illegal aliens will receive advance-parole status — a glide path to citizenship and full voting rights, though not for some time.
This should be of grave concern to lawmakers and all Americans who care about the rule of law and election integrity. Although amnesty proponents and many Democrats downplay the significance of voting by illegal aliens, they could easily change the outcome of a number of elections.
Consider: Each year, thousands of state and local elections are decided by a handful of votes (indeed, Ohio’s secretary of state, John Husted, testified that in the last 15 months 70 Ohio elections were tied or decided by one vote). And we’re not talking about small or obscure elections in which only a few hundred votes are cast.
For example, in the 2005 election for Virginia attorney general Bob McDonnell won by only 323 votes out of more than 1.9 million cast. For perspective, a Pew Research study estimates there are 210,000 illegal aliens in Virginia today. Even if a tiny fraction vote, they easily could tip an election.
The 2004 Washington State gubernatorial election was decided by a mere 133 votes out of 2.8 million cast. Pew estimates there are 230,000 illegal aliens in Washington.
And most famously, in the 2000 presidential election in which 101 million votes were cast, George W. Bush won by getting 537 more votes in Florida than Al Gore. Pew estimates there are 925,000 illegal aliens living in Florida now.
A notable number of legal immigrants already vote illegally in elections. A recent Cooperative Congressional Elections Study calculated that 6.4 percent of non-citizens in the U.S. voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of them did so in 2010. Even if those figures are high and only 1 percent of aliens in Florida vote in 2016, nearly 10,000 unlawful votes would be cast — almost 20 times the margin of victory in the 2000 presidential election.
Care to guess the likely beneficiaries of such votes in 2016?
So the message here is “Screw applying for immigration; just cross the border illegally, contact Obama admin and you will receive our ‘Welcome to the US’ package: a place to stay, a job w/social security card, a nice tax refund for taxes you never paid in, and a voting card — and that’s just the beginning!”