More than 500 noncitizens have registered to vote in Tuesday’s election. Washington, DC, Council elections.
District of Columbia Board of Elections (DCBOE) spokeswoman Sarah Graham told Fox News Digital that as of May 29, the latest available count, there are 523 non-citizen Washington, D.C. residents registered to vote.
Graham said this includes 310 registered Democrats, 28 Republicans, 16 from the DC Statehood Green Party and 169 unaffiliated non-citizen voters who are not registered with any party.
Graham said the DCBOE does not collect data on the nationality of non-citizen voters, but Washington Post He spoke to non-citizen voters from El Salvador, Iran and Ethiopia.
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A sign for an early voting site is photographed at the Stead Park Recreation Center in northwest Washington, DC, on May 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Robert Yun)
Just a few days before June 4 Washington, DC, Primary, 52 House Democrats voted with Republicans to support a 2022 bill to overturn a Washington, D.C. law that allows non-citizens to vote in local elections. While it is unclear whether the Democrat-controlled Senate will take up the legislation, the margin of House Democrats supporting the bill has increased from the 42 who voted to repeal the law last year.
The House Administration Committee has held two hearings in recent weeks discussing how non-citizen voting affects confidence in U.S. elections and poses a risk of foreign interference.
“The D.C. Board of Elections recently confirmed that nearly 500 noncitizens have registered to vote in our nation’s capital, and that number continues to grow. Early voting for the D.C. primary election is happening right now. And as we sit here today, noncitizens are voting to elect members of the D.C. City Council. It’s absurd,” Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said during his opening statements last week.
“We have to do two things. First, we cannot allow the DC citizens voting law to spread throughout the United States,” he said. “And second, we have to make sure that non-citizens do not vote in federal elections in the United States. While it is illegal today for non-citizens to vote in our federal elections, it is also illegal to evade Border Patrol and enter the country illegally. And as we have seen, that hasn’t stopped anyone.”
During early voting for the DC Council primary, 6,051 people have already voted in person at polling places across the district, 27,734 mail-in ballots have been received through the US Postal Service and 18,492 ballots have been received through drop boxes, according to the latest data posted on the DCBOE website.
House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., has been holding hearings in recent weeks about concerns over noncitizen voting across the U.S. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
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As of April 30, 450,750 people were registered to vote in the country’s capital.
Graham pointed out that these figures are calculated on a monthly basis, so the latest numbers available are from April, since May ended just four days ago, and council elections in Washington, D.C., are taking place on Tuesday.
Last year, Ethiopian immigrant Abel Amene, First non-citizen elected Amené ran unopposed for public office in Washington, D.C., as Ward 4 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner.
Abel Amin, Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in Ward 4 and the first non-citizen to hold public office in Washington, DC, smiles after casting an early vote in the district election on May 31, 2024. (Jenny Gathright/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Amen claimed in an article, “I like to say that non-citizens voting is actually as American as apple pie. It’s been happening for centuries as part of the fabric of America.” Interview with WUSA last week. “We pay taxes. I can be recruited, so I don’t really know what the controversy is about. We cannot participate in federal elections. We just want to vote for our ANC and our council members.”
Another noncitizen voter, Shaghayegh Chris Rostampour, who moved to the U.S. from Iran in 2018 for graduate school at Brandeis University and then to Washington, D.C., for work, argued that illegal immigrants who register to vote in local elections would not risk breaking the law to vote at the federal level.
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“A person who is either on a student visa or a work visa, or is on a path to citizenship, or has applied for asylum or has no documents“When it’s illegal to vote in federal elections, they’re not going to take the risk to actually register and all the work that they’ve done, the risk, all the sacrifice that they’ve made to vote, that ballot will not be counted,” Rostampour said in an interview with WUSA.
At last week’s hearing, Steele argued that letting noncitizens vote in local elections “will continue to create challenges for states to maintain clean voter rolls.” The chairman said the committee found a week ago that Ohio had 137 noncitizens on its voter rolls and pointed to how Virginia removed 1,481 noncitizens from its voter rolls in May 2023.
