Arcan Cetin faces five counts of murder after his shooting rampage at a Seattle-area mall last week. But he also turns out to be a non-citizen who has voted three times in state elections since 2014. Liberals claim non-citizen voting fraud is extremely rare, but Cetin’s case should cast light on both just how easy it is to commit and the efforts of federal and state officials to block efforts to uncover it.
Cetin, who is from Turkey, is a legal resident of the United States but not a citizen. In 2014, he registered to vote and voted three times, most recently in May’s presidential primary. Washington State, like all but a handful of states, doesn’t require any proof of citizenship. “Our hands are kind of tied,” Secretary of State Kim Wyman told a Seattle TV station, noting that the state doesn’t allow verification of a person’s citizenship for voting purposes. “But make no mistake,” she adds. “We want to make sure that everybody has confidence that people casting ballots are eligible. This is certainly going to be a topic at the next legislative session.” Local registrars can currently use a database to check the age and residence of people who register to vote, but a person’s claim to be a citizen is based on the honor system.
The problem is that not all non-citizens are honorable — or they may be led astray in being told they can vote. In our 2012 book Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk, Hans von Spakovsky and I noted numerous cases of non-citizen registration and voting all over the country.
In 2014, a study released by three professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, estimated that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election and that 2.2 percent voted in the 2010 midterm congressional elections.
Since 80 percent of non-citizens vote Democratic, according to the study, non-citizen participation could have “been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes [in North Carolina in 2008], and congressional elections,” such as the 2008 race in Minnesota in which Al Franken was elected to the U.S. Senate, giving Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote to pass Obamacare.
The authors’ paper is consistent with other credible reports of non-citizen voting. In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 people who were called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period in one of the 94 current U.S. district courts were non-citizens. In 2012, a local NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla., found that at least 100 individuals in one county had been excused from jury duty because they were not citizens but were registered to vote. Many had also voted in some elections.
But federal agencies refuse — in direct violation of federal law — to provide citizenship data to state election officials who attempt to verify citizenship status. Kansas and Arizona have put in place new commonsense proof-of-citizenship requirements for registration to prevent illegal voting, but they have been fought tooth and nail by Obama’s Justice Department. The DOJ is even using strong-arm methods to intervene in a lawsuit challenging the right of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to allow states to require proof of citizenship when registering. Rather than fulfill its duty to represent a federal agency, the DOJ is siding with the League of Women Voters and the NAACP in the case. A federal judge, Richard Leon, has already been rebuked by the DOJ for its “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” refusal to defend a federal agency and its decision instead to side with the plaintiffs suing it.
Take Virginia, where last year Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would have required jury commissioners to forward information to election officials on individuals who were excused from jury duty for not being a citizen. Then James Alcorn, one of McAuliffe’s two Democratic appointees on the Virginia Board of Elections, proposed that rules be changed so that people who left the citizenship question unanswered on the voter-registration form would still be allowed to register. A few years ago, the Fairfax County Electoral Board found close to 300 non-citizens who had illegally registered, about half of whom had also illegally voted in prior elections. No action was taken to prosecute any of those non-citizens.
