For years, anyone who raised concerns about noncitizens casting ballots in American elections got treated like they just claimed the moon landing was filmed in a garage. Conspiracy theorist! Vote suppressor! Tinfoil hat enthusiast! Well, as USA Journal recently highlighted, Politico itself has now published what amounts to a giant neon sign reading "Yeah, about that."
New Jersey discovered 6,600 noncitizens on its voter rolls. Six thousand six hundred. That is not "vanishingly rare." That is a mid-size college campus worth of people who should not have been registered. And here comes the quote that should be framed and hung in every election office in America. New Jersey's own election administrator said, "It's the honor system. There's little to stop noncitizens from registering to vote if they want to, or even by mistake."
The honor system! We are protecting the most fundamental act of democracy with the same security protocol your office uses for the communal coffee fund. Just trust people, what could possibly go wrong?
But wait, it gets better. Election officials from both parties now believe that 6,600 figure dramatically understates the real number, because the automatic registration system has been cranking away since 2018, and that disclosure only covered a single year. The cumulative total over eight years? Nobody knows, because the state won't release the data. Nothing screams transparency like refusing to answer the obvious follow up question.
Meanwhile, down in Texas, a British national named Ada Ngozi Otuka registered and voted in five separate elections between 2012 and 2024. Twelve years of participation, and the system never caught her. She only came to light because she disclosed it herself on a naturalization application. The fraud detection mechanism was literally "please tell on yourself." Incredible security architecture there, folks.
Brit Hume summed up the situation by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, people should stop mocking those who worry about noncitizens voting. Revolutionary concept, that.
Across four states that actually cooperated and checked their records, 270,000 noncitizen registrations were identified. Two hundred seventy thousand. But sure, for years the media chorus sang in perfect harmony that this was all made up, that concerns about election integrity were just coded language for suppression, and that anyone asking questions was peddling baseless conspiracies.
That coordinated dismissal required the public to believe that a pinky promise was an adequate substitute for actual verification. It required ignoring thousands of documented cases and hoping nobody would do the math.
As commentator Ward Clark put it, the acceptable number of illegal votes is zero. Not a handful, not a rounding error, not 6,600. Zero. The SAVE America Act proposes replacing the honor system with something that actually verifies citizenship before registration. The concept of checking whether someone is eligible before letting them vote shouldn't be controversial, and yet here we are, treating it like some radical proposition.
Politico said the quiet part out loud. The system is broken. Maybe fix it before the next election proves the point all over again.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
