It stands to reason that if we want to have reliable and secure elections, we must make every effort to ensure that only legal votes are cast and recorded. On Sunday, Secretaries of State Brad Raffensperger (R-GA) and Adrian Fontes (D-AZ) engaged in a lively discussion on NBC’s “Meet the Press” with host Kristen Welker about Attempted voting by non-citizens:
Welker asked Raffensperger why the issue of non-citizens voting in the election was so urgent when it was quite occasional and illegal.
“Because I believe that only American citizens should be allowed to vote in our elections. And I ran in 2018 with the same message. I am the first Secretary of State in Georgia to ever conduct a 100 percent citizenship verification,” Raffensperger replied.
He said the state found about 1,600 people who tried to register to vote, but they could not find confirmation of their citizenship.
“So my fellow Georgians asked me, ‘Are noncitizens allowed to vote in Georgia?’ I can say, ‘No, they don’t,’ because we checked,” Raffensperger said.
Surprisingly, Minister Fontes used the fact that a review had taken place as an argument for not conducting the review:
Fontes turned to Raffensperger and said that he had proved his own point with this example.
“They did an audit and found that there were attempts. But none of those people were actually registered and none of those people actually voted. And that means that elections in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and across the country were protected from non-citizen voting,” Fontes said. “So, I think this is a red herring.”
This is about more than just non-citizen voting. This is part of the nation’s problem with election integrity. Another of the most vital measures to ensure election integrity is to make sure only eligible citizens vote. Too many Americans are lose faith in the electoral processThis is not without reason.
See also: Majority of Americans support voter ID and other election integrity laws that Democrats call “racist”
AG Merrick Garland promotes unsafe elections and criticizes “unnecessary” voter ID
Secretary Raffensperger said furtherin response to Fontes:
But that’s not the case, because there are already left-wing groups trying to get non-citizens to vote in local elections in Washington, DC, New York City, and elsewhere. And if people really believe that, then why are we being sued by the left to stop us from verifying citizenship?
It is also exclusively the left that fights against ID required to vote. This is a bit confusing because in this Meet the Press discussion, all parties, including Georgia Republicans and Arizona Democrats, seem to agree on the need for election security; their discussion was about noncitizens trying to vote, but the same arguments could easily apply to people voting under the name of someone else or a deceased relative, or even engaging in questionable ballot tampering.
When we vote here in the Valley, we go to our community center, show our ID, sign the record, and fill out a ballot that the people count. Granted, in a precinct with only a few thousand votes to count, hand counting and verification is much more feasible than in a major city with millions of votes cast. But there is no good argument against every citizen having their identity verified and checked against a record of registered voters before receiving a ballot. This is a fundamental aspect of ensuring secure elections, without which we will no longer have a representative, constitutional republic.
Whether it’s non-citizens seeking to vote or other election manipulation, there is simply no good reason why voters should not be able to prove their identity and eligibility. Any other position should be viewed with the utmost suspicion.
