03/05/2019
During the Georgia gubernatorial campaign, Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams said that a “blue wave” of voters would include “documented and undocumented” aliens. [Stacey Abrams: ‘Blue Wave’ Is ‘Comprised of Those Who Are Documented and Undocumented’, Paul Crookston, WFB, October 12, 2018] Ludicrously, she more recently said that “voter fraud is a myth” — which invites the obvious question: If voting by “undocumented” immigrants isn’t vote fraud, what is? [Stacey Abrams: ‘Voter Fraud Is a Myth,’ ‘Voter Suppression Is Real,’ by Jeff Poor, Breitbart.com, February 19, 2019] Abrams’ claim reveals a truth about our elites and their mouthpieces in the Main Stream Media: They prefer aliens to Americans — especially at the ballot box..
Thus House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said recently that a border wall is “immoral” and “not who we are” — remarks that inspired Steve Sailer to quip that “who we are, evidently, are the people who aren’t here yet”. [The Scramble for America, Takimag.com, January 30, 2019]
It might be better to put it this way: Pelosi’s “we” aren’t really Americans. They either reject that identity — call them post-Americans — or don’t have roots in or connections to America in the first place.
Here’s how prevalent that view is inside the Washington Beltway, particularly among Abrams-Pelosi Democrats: Before the 2018 midterm elections, Congress voted on a Republican-backed resolution condemning localities that permit illegal aliens and other non-citizens to vote in local elections. Voting against the measure were 71 Democrats and a lone Republican, Michigan-born Justin Amash, the son of a Palestinian Christian father and a Syrian Christian mother. Another 69 Republicans voted “present.” Just 49 Democrats joined 230 House Republicans to vote for it. [140 House Democrats Refuse to Condemn Illegal Aliens Voting, by John Binder, Breitbart.com, September 26, 2018]
Binder’s report on the vote demonstrated just how far the push to permit illegals to vote has gone. In July, he reported, 170 Democrats voted “present” or against a resolution supporting ICE. A number of Democrats had called for abolishing that agency. And Chicago, San Francisco, and a number of Boston suburbs had effectively granted non-citizens voting rights. [Allowing non-citizens with legal status to vote isn’t unprecedented. But would it work in Boston?, by Nikolas DeCosta-Klipa, Boston.com, July 10, 2018]
Federal law does not prohibit non-citizens from voting in state and local elections, but no state has allowed it since Arkansas banned the practice in 1926. [Voting Rights: Earned or Entitled?, by Simon Thompson, Harvard Political Review, December 3, 2010] However, recent municipal measures clearly intend to chip away at those laws. Chicago issues to illegal aliens ID cards that Illinois has ruled acceptable for voter registration. As the Center for Immigration Studies noted, the ID card was created with “undocumented immigrants” in mind. To vote, they just check a box on a registration form to claim citizenship. The city does not verify the claim. [Chicago Dilutes Right to Vote by Designating Illegal Alien ID Card as a Registration Document, by Dan Cadman, March 2, 2018]
Another example: Like 16 other states and Washington, D.C., California fortified 1993’s federally-mandated motor-voter registration law to automatically register anyone who gets or renews his driver’s license. “Undocumented” aliens can get a driver’s license in California and by 2017, more than 900,000 had done so.
Aliens are not eligible to be automatically registered, but after the motor-voter upgrade went into effect last year, California’s state administration acknowledged that thousands, including resident aliens (the state claimed none were illegals), were improperly registered [California DMV admits that non-citizens are registered to vote, by Sophia Bollag, Associated Press, October 8, 2018]. Note that “in most cases,” California does not require an ID to vote.
When President Trump asserted that non-citizens were voting, the usual suspects countered by saying that voter fraud is very rare, if it happened at all. Since then, Trump has shut down the commission he appointed in 2017 to look into voter fraud, “not because it didn’t find anything, but because it faced a fusillade of lawsuits and stonewalling from state election officials” . [Voter Fraud: Yes, Noncitizens Are Voting In Elections — Texas Just Proved It, IBD, January 28, 2019]
But of course, Trump was right. And Texas’ Republican Attorney General, Ken Paxton, proved it. After a year-long investigation that included records held by the state’s public safety department, which issues driver’s licenses, he claimed that 95,000 non-citizens appeared to be on the state’s voting rolls and that 58,000 had voted in at least one election. [Texas says it found 95,000 non-citizens on voter rolls; 58,000 have voted, by Adam Shaw, Fox News, January 26, 2019] Paxton noted that anyone can register to vote merely by claiming citizenship. Texas does not verify those claims.
Paxton’s suspicions are connected to a fight over the Texas voter ID law, which required a valid photo ID to vote. Before the 2016 election, a federal judge overturned it. So Texas adopted an alternative. It permitted someone without the ID required in the previous law to present a birth certificate, utility bill, or bank statement to confirm his identity. Such voters also had to provide a signed affidavit to explain why they did not have a valid photo ID.
Guess what happened? In 2017, the same judge who struck down the original law, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, struck down the alternative. Appointed by President Obama, she is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who can claim dual Mexican citizenship. [New Texas voter ID law discriminates, federal judge rules, by Ariane de Vogue and Steve Almasy, CNN, August 23, 2017] Last year, Texas won an appeal on the previous ruling. [Texas’ Voter ID Law Does Not Discriminate and Can Stand, Appeals Panel Rules, by Manny Fernandez, The New York Times, April 27, 2018] The judges on the appeal panel were named Higginbotham, Jones, and Graves.
Paxton’s announcement set off a wave of “voter suppression” stories in MSM. Many on Paxton’s list of possible non-citizens should not be there, the MSM claimed, because they had proved eligibility to vote — although the “proof” offered was not always clear. Paxton’s opponents also have argued that some on the list might have presented a green card to acquire a driver’s license, then subsequently might have become citizens and registered to vote. [Nearly 20 percent of Tarrant voters flagged for citizenship scrutiny didn’t belong on list, by Anna M. Tinsley, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, January 29, 2019]
In Texas, a legal alien resident can acquire a driver’s license that is labelled “Limited Term,” meaning that the driver’s license expires when the term of legal residency expires. The state had previously marked such licenses “Temporary Visitor,” with the licenses showing the dates of the term of legal residency for aliens who were not lawful permanent residents, refugees or asylees, but that labelling was ended by court order six months after it was implemented back in 2008. The new provision for marking legal residents’ licenses was not instituted until 2011. Thus, Paxton had a reason to wonder how many aliens might have slipped through the legal gaps and been registered to vote in years past.
Texas’ Secretary of State David Whitley’s spokesman specifically said the report did not mean the state has positively identified 95,000 non-citizen voters. Rather, the secretary’s office “was advising local officials to ask these voters via mail to provide proof of their citizenship.” But, importantly, “the method they had used to identify these potentially problematic voter registrations had left ‘very little, if any’ room for error” [Texas Secretary of State Questions Citizenship of 95,000 Registered Voters, by Liam Stack, January 25, 2019].
Nevertheless, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, a Clinton appointee, has just ordered Texas to halt the removal of any registered voters from voter rolls, claiming that "The evidence has shown in a hearing before this Court that there is no widespread voter fraud." [Federal Judge Orders Texas To End 'Flawed' Effort To ID Noncitizen Voters, by Richard Gonzales, NPR, February 27, 2019]
Biery was referring to a statement made by a representative of the Texas Secretary of State’s office that more than 25,000 of the 98,000 names that turned up on a final list of suspect voters were now, in fact, citizens. The reference was to names that had been checked up to that point, as the review was never completed. Biery’s order [PDF] did concede that thus far “approximately 80” of the names on the list were ineligible to vote.
Texas AG Paxton responded that Biery was “improperly assuming control” over the state’s voting system. He said that the state was “weighing its options” in addressing the ruling, which Paxton noted prevented “county election officials from directly communicating with individual voters about their citizenship,” blocking those officials from “discharging their duty to remove ineligible voters from the voting rolls for any reason without first obtaining the Court’s permission.”
At the same time, Paxton said that the state would continue “making our case that ineligible voters should not vote and counties are free to continue to follow the law and keep their voter rolls clean" [AG Paxton Releases Statement on Order Restricting the Secretary of State from Cooperating with Counties to Maintain Voter Rolls, February 27, 2019]
It’s clear that Paxton’s Treason Lobby opponents simply want to prevent any thorough review of the state’s list of registered voters.
Judge Biery, for instance, wrote that the state’s letters addressed to people on the list of suspect voters regarding their citizenship status created “fear and anxiety” among “the least powerful among us,” meaning immigrants (“No native born Americans were subjected to such treatment” .) While in theory county officials can still pursue efforts to clarify citizenship status without directly contacting suspect voters, Biery, as Paxton noted, is effectively taking control of the process. His court having the final say on whether a particular name can be removed from the voter rolls. The result will likely be a “chilling effect” on election officials, making them less likely to press for the removal of suspect names.
This is in the teeth, remember, of the midterm election scandal in Travis County, the home of the state capital, Austin, Texas’ Leftist “blue heaven.” James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released video that showed county election workers ready and willing to register non-citizens to vote.
One election worker said “tons of them” had come in during early voting, and claimed that a phantom DREAMERer could vote if he were registered. [Texas Poll Worker on Illegal Immigrants Voting: “We Got Tons of Them”, by Cary Cheshire, Texas Scorecard, November 6, 2018]
“Tons “of illegal voters? No wonder Paxton wanted to know how many aliens slipped through the legal gaps and registered to vote. Even a few thousand votes could potentially swing an election.
But the effect of voter fraud goes beyond any one election. As Breitbart’s Binder noted, and VDARE.com has been reporting for years, illegal aliens are counted in congressional apportionment. Thus, blue states with high illegal-alien populations like California are set to gain seats in the House, while states with low illegal-alien populations, like West Virginia, could lose seats. [The Impact of Non-Citizens on Congressional Apportionment, by Steven A. Camarota, December 6, 2005]
In my red home state of Texas, lots of illegal aliens mean more seats — and, eventually, the Lone Star State’s turning blue.
And at a time of the largest sustained wave of immigration in United States history, legal aliens too will affect congressional apportionment. Why is that important? Because the number of a state’s electoral votes is the sum of the its two senators plus its congressmen. If more immigration means more House seats, it also means more electoral votes. So illegal and legal immigration will affect future presidential elections.
So who are Pelosi’s “we”? It’s a good question in a country in which the number of illegal aliens is so great that we literally don’t know how many there are. [Yale, MIT study: 22 million, not 11 million, undocumented immigrants in US, by Rafael Bernal, The Hill, September 24, 2018].
It’s also a good question, of course, because we don’t know how many are voting.
So which “we” will speak in future elections is a question with a fuzzy answer.
The Treason Lobby has, however, made its opinion quite clear.
“We” does not, dear reader, include you.
Wayne Allensworth a corresponding editor of Chronicles magazine, is the author of The Russian Question and a recently published novel, Field of Blood (Endeavour Media) which deals with the issues of Open Borders and globalization’s impact on the fictional town of Parmer, Texas.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.