Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted revealed that dozens of noncitizens voted in the 2016 election.
Dozens, mind you, not thousands. And a few hundred (not a few million) non-citizens were registered to vote in the Buckeye State:
Ohio’s secretary of state Monday announced that his office has uncovered 385 non-citizens registered to vote in Ohio — 82 of whom have managed to cast ballots.
Jon Husted, a Republican and likely candidate for Ohio governor, said the non-citizens who registered but never voted will be sent letters requesting they cancel their ballot. But if they fail to cancel their registration, they could ultimately be referred for prosecution.
The 82 who did vote “will be immediately referred to law enforcement for further investigation and possible prosecution,” a release from Husted’s office said.
“In light of the national discussion about illegal voting it is important to inform our discussions with facts. The fact is voter fraud happens, it is rare and when it happens, we hold people accountable,” Husted said in the statement.
You don’t need to deny that voter fraud exists at all to recognize that it’s not the major problem President Trump has claimed. Yet by the same token, there hasn’t been enough enforcement of cases that should have been easy to root out. For every fake vote cast, someone’s real vote is canceled out unjustly. That’s a form of voter suppression.
Between Trump himself (before the election) and his critics (after the election) doing their best to cast doubt on the legitimacy and integrity of our elections, measures that boost public faith in the voting process (including voter ID, although that measure might not have prevented all of these particular illegal votes) are appropriate. The purpose here isn’t to suppress turnout, but to restore faith in a system that has real holes in it.
Those who refuse even to acknowledge that the holes exist are only making people more suspicious, because we know they are there. In the not-so-distant past, in certain elections up to and below the presidential level, it is generally agreed that those holes were ruthlessly exploited and might have even swung Illinois’ electoral votes to JFK in 1960. We can take the problem seriously without believing it’s burning down our democratic institutions.
We passed the Voting Rights Act to stop Southern Democrats from systematically suppressing black votes in the South — not just because it was unfair and violated eligible voters’ Constitutional rights, but also because they were openly rigging elections, making a true mockery of our republican form of government. Illegal voting might be much rarer than it used to be, but every single case of it creates that same latter problem and deserves to be rooted out.
