Senate Dems on Shaky Ground When It Comes to Non-Citizen Voting

With the passage of the SAVE Act in the House to prevent non-citizens from voting, Democratic Senate candidates in swing states give mixed signals on where they stand

A bill to prevent non-citizens from voting tests vulnerable Democratic Senate candidates’ loyalty to their states’ voters over radicals seeking to leave the door open to foreign influence in elections.

On July 10, the Republican-led House of Representatives passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act) to amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). If signed into law, the SAVE Act will require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.

The bill passed 221 to 198 with 14 abstentions. Five Democrats voted with the Republican majority. It now heads to the Senate where Senator Mike Lee (R–UT) introduced similar legislation.

The Biden administration denounced the SAVE Act, reminding voters that those who vote illegally already risk prosecution and deportation. It claimed that states effectively safeguard against illegal voting and fearmongered that requiring ID to prove citizenship would disenfranchise American citizens.

The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump compares the SAVE Act to hypothetical legislation to protect from bear attacks. He argues this would inconvenience most people who will never face a bear. But unlike bear attacks, non-citizens voting in federal elections affects all Americans. If foreign citizens target a handful of battleground states, it could lead to another frivolous war or a president who puts another country’s interests over the U.S.

The NVRA voter application relies on the honor system, requiring only that voter registration applicants attest to being U.S. citizens. It does ask them for a driver’s license or state-issued identification number. If that’s not available, it asks them for the last four digits of their Social Security Number. If they don’t have that either—just like in the olden days when a simple “X” would suffice if one could not sign his name—the applicant may write “NONE” in the identification box.

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office admits that failure to provide proof of citizenship does not preclude someone from voting in federal elections, stating: “A registrant who attests to being a citizen but fails to provide proof of citizenship and whose citizenship is not otherwise verified will be eligible to vote only in federal elections (known as being a “federal only” voter).”

Voters disagree by wide margins with Biden that the SAVE Act’s remedies would unduly burden Americans. 81 percent support requiring government-issued identification to vote. Democratic support for voter ID has even increased from 62 percent to 69 percent since 2023.

Despite the media’s rhythmic scolding that “there is no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting,” voters’ intuition tells them otherwise. Immigration consistently ranks as a top issue, and they overwhelmingly support allowing only U.S. citizens to vote.

In 2022, when New York became the first major city to legalize non-citizen voting, the left-leaning Atlantic called it “the voting-rights debate Democrats don’t want to have.” Even New York’s in-house democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—whose district includes more foreigners than Times Square on New Year’s Eve—refused to comment on the issue.

As the U.S. continues to add millions of foreigners to its population each year, many of them have illegally registered to vote already even if they haven’t yet voted. A study from Just Facts found that 10 to 27 percent of non-citizens in the U.S. are registered to vote. That’s over 12 million potential illegal voters. In 2020, President Joe Biden only beat former President Donald Trump by seven million votes. In Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona, he only beat him by a combined 44,000—without which, the Electoral College would have ended in a tie.

Multiple states have had to remove non-citizens from their voter rolls, and those states attest that non-citizens have voted in the past. But the bar remains high to determine whether someone is an illegally registered voter, often requiring the person admit it. The SAVE Act would make it easier to identify non-citizen voters by forcing the federal government to share its immigration databases with the states. 

But non-citizens don’t have to go out of their way to break U.S. voting laws.

Restoration News has reported on the 2021 Biden executive order that requires federal departments, such as welfare offices, to engage in voter registration.

President Bill Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act of 1996 bars non-citizens from accessing federal welfare. However, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas’s rampant expansion of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) flooded the welfare offices with foreigners because of the asylee loophole in the welfare reform law. Non-citizens, therefore, receive unsolicited voter registration forms from welfare offices that hand them out without requiring proof of citizenship. 

(RELATED: Meet the $2 Billion Coalition that Wants Non-Citizen Voting in Our Elections)

Gallego and Slotkin: Party Over Citizens

In Feb. 2023, Arizona Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego—who represents Arizona’s 3rd Congressional district—voted against a resolution to halt a law passed in Washington D.C. that allowed non-citizens to vote in local elections.

In a statement, Gallego said:

I believe voting is a fundamental right reserved for the citizens of the United States, and I will oppose any effort to erode that right in Arizona and on the federal level. But Washington, D.C. is not Arizona, and I do not believe Congress should be in the business of telling the residents of Washington, D.C. how to hold their democratic elections. Today’s vote, if anything, is yet another example of why we need D.C. statehood, so those living in Washington no longer find themselves at the mercy of a vindictive Republican House majority [emphasis added].

When the election year rolled around, however, Gallego discovered his inner moderate. On May 24, 2024, he joined 51 other Democrats in voting for H.R. 192 to prohibit non-citizens from voting in D.C. after the Senate ignored the 2023 resolution.

Gallego defended his about-face, saying: “This bill made important improvements on the previous attempt, which was a half-baked proposal with dangerous implications, including the inability for American citizens living in D.C. to access our judicial system.”

But H.R. 192 neither added nor subtracted from the 2023 resolution, and in his stated opposition to the latter, he mentioned nothing about judicial access.

Interestingly, Gallego’s vote for H.R. 192 came about a week after Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake launched an ad campaign, hitting him for his original support of non-citizens’ voting.

In an attempt to bring clarity to his position, on June 29, 2024, Gallego introduced the Voting Clarity Act (VCA), which mandates Customs and Border Protection agents inform asylum-seekers that they are not allowed to vote until they become citizens—which would likely have the same effect as telling them they have to show up for an asylum court date.

Gallego voted against the SAVE Act, claiming like Biden that it would inconvenience American citizens.

Elissa Slotkin, who represents Michigan’s 7th congressional district, voted for both the 2023 resolution to block the D.C. law and H.R. 192 to overturn it. However, she also voted no on the SAVE Act. Unlike Gallego, she hasn’t addressed noncitizen voting or issued statements or social media posts explaining her votes on the issue.

(RELATED: Ruben Gallego is a Radical in Moderate’s Clothing)

Democrats on Election Integrity

The five incumbent Democratic Senators in battleground states up for reelection in 2024—Jacky Rosen (Nevada), Jon Tester (Montana), Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), and Bob Casey (Pennsylvania)—are unlikely to publicly comment on the SAVE Act, as Schumer will likely ignore it as he did the House bills to revoke non-citizen voting in D.C.

Rosen and Tester did cosponsor the Freedom to Vote Act (FVA) in 2021, which received universal Democratic support in the Senate. Had it passed, the FVA would have mandated automatic voter registration (AVR) in the entire country. This would require every state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to register voters when they receive a driver’s license.

Even left-leaning NPR has acknowledged that non-citizens slip through the cracks when DMVs do this in the absence of AVR. Sometimes, foreign nationals assume that because the DMV sent them a voter registration form, they’re eligible to vote. AVR only increases this risk.

After Republicans introduced the SAVE Act, California Senator Alex Padilla (D–CA) posted on X/Twitter that the obsession with the “nonissue” of non-citizens’ voting “is a thinly veiled cover for the xenophobia that fuels the MAGA base.” Yet when he was California’s Secretary of State he admitted that up to 1,500 non-citizens were automatically registered to vote under the state’s AVR.

AVR also prompts under-prosecution of illegal-voting non-citizens for fear of prosecuting someone who in good faith misunderstood the law or was registered without their knowledge. West Virginia was one of the first states to pass AVR. Its Secretary of State’s general counsel Donald Kersey told NPR in 2019 that the state was only prosecuting a single such case out of many. “In the current system,” he said, “the noncitizen can just say, or can misunderstand, and just say yeah, ‘I’m eligible. I’m a U.S. citizen.”

None of the Democratic candidates in battleground states have openly endorsed non-citizens’ voting. Even Gallego, when he voted to let D.C. allow non-citizens to vote, framed it as a home rule issue. Schumer will likely not bring the SAVE Act to a vote in the Senate, so Democratic incumbents will be able to more easily avoid the issue. Gallego and Slotkin, meanwhile, are on record at best ignoring a vulnerability to election integrity and at worst facilitating potential foreign influence in federal elections.

Jacob Grandstaff is a freelance writer in Tennessee. He graduated from the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.

(READ MORE: The Democrats Just Showed They Want Non-Citizens Voting in Our Elections Forever)