Hundreds of non-citizens were registered to vote in Philadelphia over the last decade, and at least 90 of them actually ended up casting ballots that should never have been allowed, City Commissioner Al Schmidt said Wednesday, adding more fuel to complaints of bogus voting in U.S. elections.
The voters are all self-admitted non-citizens who went back and canceled their registrations later — but not before casting illegal ballots a total of 227 times in elections spanning 2006 to 2007, Mr. Schmidt said.
He said most of those non-citizens signed up to vote at PennDOT, the state motor vehicles bureau, when they went to get a driver’s license. While legal residents and long-term visitors are allowed to hold licenses, they are not allowed to vote in federal elections — yet thanks to a federal law, the sign-up for both licenses and voter registration is often tied together.
“The current voter registration process at PennDOT is both harmful to election integrity and to members of the immigrant community seeking citizenship,” Mr. Schmidt said.
The data offers a boost to President Trump, who has claimed voters are tainted by non-citizens casting illegal ballots.
While Mr. Trump’s claims of millions of such votes have not been substantiated, Philadelphia’s data does show that fraudulent voting does happen — contradicting the claims of voting-rights activists who said it is so rare as to not be worth investigating.
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