President Trump’s Department of Justice has just announced they will be cracking down on states and demanding local election officials to clean up their voter rolls to help ward off noncitizens from voting.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi says their role is to ensure that illegal voting activity isn’t happening by asking states to assist in identifying possible flaws in their election practices and voter registration lists.
“Election integrity starts with clean voter rolls. There’s been a culture of noncompliance from several states that don’t keep their roles updated and the DOJ is cracking down,’ a source told Fox News.
One of the groups leading the way to have cleaner elections is Florida’s James Madison Institute (JMI).
Ben Gibson, Senior Fellow at JMI says one of the ways to deal with noncitizens trying to vote in elections is to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, knows as SAVE.
Gibson says the bill would require states to obtain documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering individuals to vote in federal elections.
Eligible documents include a REAL ID-compliant identification indicating U.S. citizenship; a valid U.S. passport; a military ID and service record showing U.S. birthplace; a government-issued photo ID showing U.S. birthplace; or a government-issued photo ID that does not indicate birthplace or citizenship and a valid secondary document.
“The SAVE Act would be an important process in cleaning up the voting rolls in a state,” said Gibson.
James Madison listed several recommendations that would improve the SAVE Act:
Require that states’ programs to remove noncitizens from voter rolls include interaction with other states’ databases to enable regular information exchanges.
This would allow states to regularly verify the accuracy of their voter rolls by comparing them to other states’ jury forms, DMV records, and other government records to identify noncitizens.
Further amend the NVRA to prohibit Automatic Voter Registration for federal elections.
On a state level, every state should amend its constitution to ensure that only American citizens vote in elections, as many states, including Florida, have done in recent years.
Every state should compare, monthly, its voter rolls with databases maintained by its Department of Motor Vehicles, Department of Corrections, State Vital Records Division, and the State Welfare and Public Assistance Agencies.
