It’s Too Easy to Vote, Not Too Hard

Allegations of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections and other voter registration “irregularities” have been cropping up for years. Now, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, noncitizens voted in a close, contested congressional election in Orange County.

Because the race involved the apparent upset of Robert Dornan by Loretta Sanchez, more attention is likely to be paid to the blustery Dornan’s challenge--he wants Congress to invalidate the results and call a new election--than to the larger significance of what is happening to the electoral process. What is at stake is much more than one seat in Congress; the situation in California’s 46th Congressional District should turn our attention to the larger matters of the integrity of the electoral process and national sovereignty.

A nation that takes a lax attitude toward who votes in its elections is one that is in the process of surrendering its sovereignty. Self-determination, which is the raison d’etre for nationhood itself, requires a viable procedure for ensuring that only those who have made a formal and unequivocal commitment to the well-being of the nation be afforded a voice in its government.

Today it is easier to register to vote in the United States than it is to get a rental card from Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster runs an electronic credit card check before they allow a customer to walk out of the store with one of their videos. But registering to vote, the most precious right of citizenship, is done on the honor system. And, as we have learned from the initial investigation into the Dornan-Sanchez dispute, the honor system invites fraud, confusion and error into the election process, thereby undermining the integrity of the results.

A nation is more than just a collection of people who live within specified boundaries. A nation is made up of people who have made a commitment to one another, to a set of guiding principles and to the social institutions set up to provide for the common good. The very minimal demonstration of this commitment must be an oath of loyalty to this country and a renunciation of allegiances to foreign governments.

Laws such as “motor voter” and vote-by-mail and registration drives in supermarket parking lots are well-intentioned efforts to encourage participation in the democratic process, but they miss the point. The apathy expressed by the millions of Americans who don’t vote has much more to do with disillusionment in the political process than with the supposed inconvenience of registration and voting.

The attempt to make voting easier has not been accompanied by procedures to ensure the integrity of the voting process. Little effort is made to verify attestations of citizenship, to remove duplicate names from the rolls or to confirm that people actually live at the addresses they give. Long before the contested 46th District election, a KCAL-TV investigation found hundreds of noncitizens (including illegal aliens), dead people, fictitious people and even pets who were legally registered to vote in California. The KCAL reporters also discovered voters who claimed nonexistent addresses and instances in which dozens of people all claimed to be living in the same tiny apartment.

The glaring weaknesses in the voter registration system make it easily exploitable by opportunistic interest groups that are willing to bend or break the rules in order to influence the outcome of an election. Reporters for The Times found that 30% of a sample group of 46th District voters it surveyed were ineligible; all had been registered through Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (the Mexican National Brotherhood). If that same ratio holds true for all the voters Hermandad Mexicana registered in the district, it would mean 275 ineligible votes in an election that was decided by fewer than 1,000 votes. And Hermandad Mexicana probably was not the only group that registered ineligible voters.

There has not been a war fought by this country that was not ultimately justified as a defense of our freedoms and our right to self-determination. It seems that if these principles were important enough to defend with many thousands of American lives, the very least we can do is establish administrative safeguards to ensure that these principles are not abused at home. Whatever Congress decides on the Dornan-Sanchez contest is far less important than addressing these larger problems, which go to the heart of our existence as a nation and as a democracy.