As Democrats wage war on election integrity, a new poll shows a majority of Americans believe noncitizens on their states voter rolls are a problem.
Last week, the Republican-controlled House passed the SAVE (The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) America Act on a mostly party-line vote. Texas’ politically vulnerable Rep. Henry Cuellar was the lone Democrat voting for the measure.
“I support the SAVE America Act because I believe in the fundamental principle: American citizens should decide American elections,” Cuellar wrote on X. He’s not alone. The vast majority of Americans support the two pillars of the bill: Documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and voter ID to cast a ballot in federal elections.
Most of Cuellar’s liberal congressional colleagues hate the bill. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, repeating the Democrat Party’s inane talking point that the SAVE America Act is “Jim Crow 2.0,” has said the bill is “dead on arrival” in the Senate. The New York Democrat can make such bold assurances because of the feckless Senate’s 60-vote rule — and RINOs like Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who crave approbation from a corporate media that hates Republicans and collegiality from Senate Democrats incapable of such quaint political niceties.
But these elites of the upper house should know what most of their fellow Americans believe: State voter registration lists include noncitizens ineligible to vote.
‘Honor System’
A new Rasmussen Reports poll finds 55 percent of likely voters believe that noncitizens are illegally registered to vote in the state where they live, including 32 percent who say it’s very likely. Just a third (34 percent) of the 1,100 respondents surveyed on the phone and online said they don’t think foreign nationals are on the voter lists, including 16 percent who said it’s not likely at all. The remaining 11 percent weren’t sure.
Memo to the unsure and the doubters: There are noncitizens on voter rolls — thousands of them — as states and election-integrity watchdogs have found. Some of those foreign nationals end up voting, which, Democrats will hastily note, is already illegal under the National Voter Registration Act. What they won’t say is that the NVRA is an “honor system” that requires checking a box to affirm U.S. citizenship. It is a felony to dishonestly check that box, but tracking illegal votes in real-time is difficult to do.
An audit last year by the Iowa Secretary of State’s office found 35 noncitizens cast ballots that were counted in the 2024 presidential election. The same state saw a congressional incumbent win her 2020 election by a mere six votes. It makes a big difference who is and isn’t voting in elections.
“…[S]tates have been engaging in list maintenance efforts and working to remove ineligible noncitizen voters on the rolls by the thousands this cycle — in the face of the Biden-Harris immigration policy of invasion, under which millions of illegal aliens have crossed into the country,” Ben Weingarten reported for The Federalist a month before the 2024 general election.
In swing state Pennsylvania, state officials admitted that the Department of Motor Vehicles allowed non-U.S. citizens to register to vote via Pennsylvania’s “motor voter” system, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation. A Pennsylvania elections official’s initial analysis identified approximately 100,000 registered voters “who may potentially be non-citizens or may have been non-citizens at some point in time.”
Now, the Senate can do something about dirty voter rolls. The SAVE America Act also requires states to remove foreign nationals from their databases of registered voters through strengthened list maintenance processes.
A Test of Wills
Republicans, who hold a 53-47 advantage in the Senate, effectively hit the 51-vote threshold for simple majority passage when another notorious RINO, Susan Collins of Maine, announced she would support the bill. Vice President JD Vance would be the tie-breaking vote.
“The law is clear that in this country, only American citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections,” Collins wrote in a statement. “In addition, having people provide an ID at the polls, just as they have to do before boarding an airplane, checking into a hotel, or buying an alcoholic beverage, is a simple reform that will improve the security of our federal elections and will help give people more confidence in the results.”
But the GOP will have to earn it.
As The Federalist has reported, the majority could force Democrats into a so-called “talking filibuster” — a test of wills for sure. It really is the standard filibuster, long employed by the Senate until rule changes in the 1970s watered down the process. NBC News, taking a page from the Wall Street Journal, hyperbolically reported that the tactic is “doomed to fail if attempted.”
The talking or standing filibuster forces those opposed to a bill to continuously debate until they run out of patience or energy to stand and talk. While the 47 Senate Democrats could eat up a lot of time telling their fellow citizens why they don’t support a bill aimed at preventing noncitizens from voting, Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has more latitude in limiting debate thanks to how the House moved the legislation to the Senate.
“The play here is just to exhaust the other side and talk about this for so long that they finally give up, or some deal is made” to pass a bill containing a proposal that is supported by 80 percent of Americans, Thomas Lane, director for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute, said this week on The Federalist Radio Hour podcast. Invoking cloture would still require the usual 60 votes, but the fatiguing debate could bring some Dem defectors to break ranks with their party, as Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., already has done.
But getting some senators to agree to put in the time the talking filibuster would require will be a tough hill to climb.
“If there’s one thing senators don’t like to do it’s actually work and be on the floor and do what they’re actually elected to do,” Lane said.
