A Reuters review published this week found that more than 30,000 people who self-identified as noncitizens were added to U.S. voter rolls since 2000, an error the outlet attributed to “software glitches and clerical errors” rather than a coordinated push to register immigrants illegally. Reuters said it could not determine how many of those individuals actually cast ballots.
The erroneous registrations turned up in California, Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Virginia.
Don Palmer, senior legal fellow for election integrity at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital he suspects the true number is higher than what Reuters reported. “I think it’s undercounting it. I think those are the identified non-citizens that have been accidentally or erroneously placed on the voter rolls through the mistake of the driver’s license agency. I think it’s much more because we don’t know in a lot of states, either they have not conducted the audits or they’re not using tools to find noncitizens that may have accidentally been placed on the rolls,” he said.
Palmer argued the fix lies in tightening verification at the point of registration. “If they’re going to do voter registration, they need to make sure that there’s a verification in place for identity and for citizenship, just as if you come into an agency and you’re getting a driver’s license or identification card, you’ve got to show that I.D.,” he said, adding that states need “a system of verifying citizenship” that most currently lack.
A bishop’s response to the I.D. debate
The report has reignited arguments over voter identification requirements, with author and nondenominational Christian leader Earl Walker Jackson, who describes himself as a descendant of enslaved ancestors, telling Fox News Digital he found claims that I.D. laws disproportionately burden Black voters offensive.
“Forgive me for being personal about this for a moment, but I just find this deeply insulting and deeply offensive because the implication is that somehow if you are black, no matter how wealthy, educated, well-to-do, somehow getting an ID is a problem for you,” Jackson said. “But on the other hand, if you’re white, no matter how poor, no matter how uneducated, no matter what your circumstances are, somehow you can get an I.D., that’s not a problem, I mean, it’s preposterous.”
Jackson said he was not surprised by the Reuters figure. “I wonder if it’s more,” he said. “We’ve been told, particularly by Democrats, that that’s not happening, that there’s nothing to see here, and yet we hear again and again documentation that it is happening.”
He also argued that Democrats’ resistance to stricter eligibility checks reflects political calculation rather than principle. “Why the Democrats are so committed to this can only be explained one way: they think it empowers people who shouldn’t vote to vote, and they believe those people are going to vote for them,” Jackson said, calling it “nothing but a power grab” and arguing that “every vote by a noncitizen does in fact cancel out the vote of an American citizen, or it amplifies it in a way that’s illegal or inappropriate.”
Jackson pointed to routine identification checks in everyday life, including at the hotel where he was staying, as evidence that requiring an I.D. is not an unreasonable burden. “What was the first thing they asked me for when I walked up to the counter? May we see your I.D., please? Should I say, ‘Wait a minute, oh, you’re discriminating against me. You know Black people can’t get I.D.s; how dare you ask?'” he said. “I mean, it’s ridiculous.”
He drew a distinction between his views on immigrants generally and on their participation in elections. “I don’t hate illegal aliens, I don’t want to see them harmed or hurt, but they don’t have a right to vote in our elections, and they shouldn’t be permitted to do so,” Jackson said. “Anybody who wants to say, well, ‘You’re a bigot, you are a hater,’ I mean, they’re going to say that. But I think most Americans are people of goodwill and don’t feel that way at all; we’re simply trying to preserve the integrity of our electoral system.”
