Feds should worry less about Russia, more about illegal voters

President Obama announced this week that his administration was taking retaliatory measures against Russia over “Grizzly Steppe,” the alleged “election hacking” perpetrated against officials associated with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

{mosads}In a sense, it’s refreshing to see the president suddenly interested in the integrity of our electoral process. He spent the last eight years turning a blind eye when it came to election fraud stemming from illegal immigration.

President-elect Trump set off a media firestorm when he warned a month before the election of the impact that illegal immigrants could have on voting. He did so again after the election when he tweeted that he would have won the popular vote if ballots cast by illegals were removed from the count.

While numerous media sources assailed Trump’s claims, they ignored the expanding volume of evidence that large numbers of illegal immigrants are committing dual felonies by registering and voting in U.S. elections.

While the exact numbers of illegal immigrant voters have yet to be fully measured, it is clear that illegal immigrants are stealing votes from U.S. citizens, and are acting as foreign nationals directly trying to influence U.S. elections to favor Democrats and their open borders policies that defy current U.S. immigration laws.

Illegal immigrants have compromised almost every existing American boundary, having been found working illegally on our military bases, nuclear power plants, and commercial jet engines despite elevated concerns after the attacks of 9/11. Why would anyone doubt they are registering to vote and casting ballots?

The mainstream media is eager to overlook numerous local articles indicating specific examples of unlawful votes cast by both documented and undocumented aliens, while sources now show a much broader problem exists that could be unimaginable in scale.

“I’ve worked in six locations across the United States. I’ve probably arrested more than a thousand illegal aliens in my career, and I routinely encounter people in possession of voter registration cards,” Immigration and Customs Special Agent Claude Arnold said in a recent interview on Fox News. Just imagine if we applied Arnold’s sample of illegal immigrant voters to our entire illegal immigrant population in the US of 12 to 22 million.

J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, recently unearthed more than 1,000 alien voters in eight counties in the swing state of Virginia. These illegal voters were discovered almost by accident and represent a much larger problem according to Adams.

“Not only is voter registration an honor system, but non-citizens have groups like the League of Women Voters fighting to preserve these vulnerabilities that allow non-citizens to vote. The law only asks you to check a box to say you are a citizen with no proof and no verification of citizenship,” Adams said. “While several states including Kansas, Georgia, Colorado, Texas, and Florida have requested use of the federal SAVE database to screen out illegal non-citizen registrants, the Obama administration has effectively prevented them from doing so. The most important thing that Trump could do is to order the Department of Homeland Security to give states complete access to federal alien databases to scrub the voter rolls.”

Adams said he is confident there are at least tens of thousands of unlawful voters in the swing state of Virginia, more than enough to affect the outcome of local, statewide, and national elections.

While no comprehensive federal studies have been possible yet due to the current administration, multiple watchdog groups share a belief that the individual cases that have been discovered represent just a small part of a much larger national iceberg.

“[The] Obama administration’s Department of Justice has immediately sued any state that has tried to clean up voter roles. We have the earmarkings of an election system that has opened the floodgates to those illegal voters that created loopholes that encourage that activity,” explained Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote.

“I believe there is a distinct possibility there are enough illegal voters to sway the outcome of the presidential races. We know from our research since 2010 that no local, state, or federal agency is checking physical and online voter registration forms for the citizenship requirement other than the check box on the forms,” she added. “And many times we have found that even registration forms check as ‘not a citizen’ are still processed and registered to vote. The end result is our elections are as unsecured and as open as our border.”

America’s top priority should be restoring the integrity of our elections and voter confidence in our electoral process. To that end, the Trump administration should consider creating an unprecedented Blue Ribbon commission made up of a diverse group of U.S. citizens and commissioning them to come up with ways to prevent fraud at the ballot box, be it from non-citizen voters or Russian hackers.

William Gheen is the president of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, a legal immigration group representing over 50,000 Americans.

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.