The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) — a public-interest law firm dedicated to election integrity that has been involved in legal cases in nine states and the District of Columbia — filed a lawsuit against Harris County, Texas, on September 28, asserting that the state’s largest county has allowed foreign nationals to register to vote. In a petition filed in the Court of Appeals for the 14th District of Texas in Houston, PILF seeks to compel Harris County Voter Registrar Ann Bennett to follow Texas election laws and reject insufficient voter applications.
Harris County, which includes Houston, had more than four million people in the last census, and is the largest county by population in Texas.
A September 28 report in Texas Scorecard noted: “Only U.S. citizens are allowed to vote in Texas elections, and it’s a violation of both state and federal law for non-citizens to vote or register to vote. But in Texas and elsewhere, registering to vote requires no documentation to verify citizenship — applicants merely check a box affirming they’re U.S. citizens.”
A PILF report stated that voter registration applications used by both the U.S. Government and the state of Texas include a direct question: “Are you a citizen of the United States?” However, when PILF researched into Harris County records they discovered a repeating problem of individuals answering “NO,” yet they were registered anyway.
The report quoted PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams, who said, “The [PILF] Foundation made a federal case to access to these records — now we see what the fight was all for. Individuals claiming to be foreign nationals should not be registered in Harris County. These failures harm citizens, but they also put those immigrants into serious jeopardy with federal officials. We hope to see swift action prior to the voting this fall.”
The petition stated the nature of the case as follows:
Respondent’s office has consistently approved applications for voter registration for facially ineligible registrants. In particular, Respondent registers to vote applicants that do not affirm and answer “YES” to the question “Are you a United States citizen?” and also answer “NO” to the same question, even though Texas law requires her to reject those applications. Tex. Elec. Code § 13.072(c).
The petition included copies of actual voter registration applications clearly showing that the applicants had checked the “No” box after the question: “Are you a United States Citizen?”
A pair of articles in The New American from August and November 2018 exposed the illegal practice of cities registering non-citizens to vote. The earlier article cited PILF’s statement that non-Americans have been added to voter rolls in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Virginia. PILF found that a significant portion of those illegally registered have been able to cast their ballots. In May 2017, PILF issued a report stating that in Virginia, 5,556 non-citizens were removed from the voting rolls between 2011 and May 2017. The PILF report also found that 1,852 of them had cast ballots.
Related articles:
Voter Rolls Continue to Show Registered Non-citizens
Video: “Tons” of Non-citizens Are Voting
Liberal Cities Want Voting Rights for Non-Citizens — Even Illegal Ones
