Pennsylvania has finally released the results of an investigation of its voter registration rolls which was concluded last summer.
As Jazz Shaw at Hot Air notes, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf had blocked the release of the results using legal maneuvers, but the information is finally out. More than 11,000 non-citizens are on the Keystone State’s voter rolls, according to the Washington Times. This is far less than the estimated 100,000 – a number that could have changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
“Pennsylvania officials have admitted to finding names of 11,198 non-citizens registered to vote on the state’s rolls — though top lawmakers suspect the number could still be higher,” the Times reported.
“I believe that we need to take action and have those people removed immediately from the tolls. They were never eligible to vote,” Republican state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe told the Times.
President Donald Trump won the state of Pennsylvania in 2016 by 44,292 votes, according to The New York Times. If every non-citizen on Pennsylvania’s voter rolls had voted, Trump still would have won (obviously). But as Shaw points out, the real issue here is how hard the governor fought to keep this information from the public until after the midterm election in 2018:
Making this problem worse isn’t the fact that there are that many non-citizens registered to vote, but that the Governor fought tooth and nail to prevent this information from going public until after the election. The original investigation took place in plenty of time for the news to be released last year, but the Governor dragged his feet until a hearing was scheduled for December. Once the election was safely out of the way, the Governor withdrew his objections.
Shaw reports that the reason so many states have thousands of non-citizens on their voter rolls is that they are tied to motor vehicle registration. For some reason, the DMV lets people register to vote when they renew their license or register a vehicle. And many states allow illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses.
In Texas, a state investigation found 95,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls, 58,000 of whom had voted in at least one election since 1996.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said of the results of the 11-month investigation:
Every single instance of illegal voting threatens democracy in our state and deprives individual Texans of their voice. Nothing is more vital to preserving our Constitution than the integrity of our voting process, and my office will do everything within its abilities to solidify trust in every election in the state of Texas.
These numbers don’t add up to an amount that could change an election – at least not yet – but it does speak to a bureaucratic error that could become a problem at some point in the future, especially if Democrats continue to oppose the need for voters to verify who they are and if they are citizens when they go to the polls.