PILF Inquiry into Noncitizen Voting Gains Traction

PILF will gain access to Chesterfield and Manassas documentation on noncitizen voting.

PILF will gain access to Chesterfield and Manassas documentation on noncitizen voting.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) has closed lawsuits against Chesterfield County and the City of Manassas, a step that will allow the organization to determine the total number of noncitizens, known to authorities, who registered and voted illegally.

Under the U.S. motor-voter law, citizens are allowed to register to vote when they pick up their driver’s licenses. Some non-citizens register illegally and later cast ballots. Sometimes registrars spot the illegal registrations and remove the non-citizens from the voter rolls. PILF has obtained the documentation for such instances for eight Virginia jurisdictions, but many, including Chesterfield and Manassas, refused to cooperate, citing privacy laws.

“These are positive steps toward quantifying the true extent of noncitizen voter registration in Virginia,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said in a web post. “Washington and Richmond alike are positioned to consider various election integrity reforms and are right to do so. Those discussions deserve precise data like we’ve obtained.”

PILF’s data dive into the eight cooperating localities found that registrars had uncovered more than 1,000 illegally registered noncitizens and documented that some 200 of them had cast ballots. If the magnitude of noncitizen voting holds true in other Virginia localities, it is possible that more than a thousand noncitizens have cast ballots statewide.

Such a number would fall far short of assertions by President Trump that noncitizens contributed millions of illegal votes nationally but it also would contradict widespread media claims that noncitizen voting is negligible. The data does not include noncitizens whose illegal registrations were not discovered by local registrars.