by WorldTribune Staff, January 31, 2019
A Pennsylvania state lawmaker is calling on state election officials to remove the names of more than 11,000 non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls.
The administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, confirmed that 11,198 non-citizens are registered to vote in Pennsylvania.
“I believe that we need to take action and have those people removed immediately from the rolls,” State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican and former chairman of a House government oversight panel, told The Washington Times in a Jan. 30 report. “They were never eligible to vote.”
Also this week, officials in Texas announced they had found more than 95,000 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls.
Related: Texas study finds 95,000 non-citizens are registered to vote, January 29, 2019
Pennsylvania officials admitted there was a glitch in state motor vehicle bureau computers which allowed non-citizens to easily register to vote.
Metcalfe and Rep. Garth Everett, a Republican and chairman of the House State Government Committee, said they weren’t able to figure out how many non-citizens had cast ballots because state officials did not release the names of the 11,198 non-citizens who were registered to vote.
“It is the tip of the iceberg,” Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog group Judicial Watch, told The Washington Times. “This shows the urgent need for citizenship verification for voting. The Department of Justice should follow up with a national investigation.”
No state requires proof of citizenship to register to vote. A U.S. District Court judge last year struck down a law championed by then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to require citizenship documentation.
In Pennsylvania, an earlier estimate put the number of non-citizens on state voting rolls at 100,000. Metcalfe made a right-to-know request under state law for the voter information. He was preparing to get the information early last year when the Wolf administration objected and went to court to try to keep it secret, the Washington Times report said.
The state Commonwealth Court, an appellate panel, scheduled a hearing for last month, but, a week before the court hearing, the Wolf administration withdrew its appeal and announced that it would turn over the information.
Metcalfe said the timing was suspicious.
“This governor has been an obstructionist in revealing this information to the citizens, and thereby I believe a participant in allowing this fraudulent activity to occur because it benefits him and his party.”
The non-citizen voters debate reached the national level in 2014 when Jesse T. Richman, a professor at Old Dominion University, and two colleagues began publishing estimates of thousands and perhaps millions of illegal voters.
The National Hispanic Survey, conducted in 2013 by Republican pollster John McLaughlin, found that 13 percent of non-citizen Hispanic respondents said they were registered to vote.
James D. Agresti, who directs research at the Just Facts nonprofit, applied the 13 percent figure to the 2010 census, which found that 11.8 million non-citizen Hispanics were living in the U.S. Agresti calculated that the number of illegally registered Hispanics could range from 800,000 to 2.2 million.
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