Approximately 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in the 2008 presidential election, according to a study released last year by professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University. The figure for the 2010 midterm elections was 2.2 percent. The Obama administration doesn’t care. In fact, it is trying to stamp out state-led efforts that would help ensure that only American citizens are electing our leaders.
The latest bureaucratic roadblocks have been erected in Arizona and Kansas, which simply want people to verify their citizenship before voting. To implement their commonsense measures, Arizona and Kansas asked the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) — a small federal agency that exists primarily to assist the states in creating the federal form citizens use to register to vote by mail — to add the proof-of-citizenship requirement to the registration instructions specific to Arizona and Kansas.
Their request was denied because of the decision of one federal employee in Washington, D.C.
Arizona and Kansas sued. A commonsense victory at the district court was overturned by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the fight to restore election integrity has now arrived at the Supreme Court, which is being asked to reverse the decision by the EAC and allow Kansas and Arizona to ensure that only citizens vote in their states.
Last week, the Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a brief, on behalf of the , supporting Supreme Court review. The brief explains to the Supreme Court that the so-called safeguards of the federal registration form have unequivocally failed to prevent non-citizen registration.
