A new voter ID bill aimed to keep illegal migrants from voting for President Biden in the 2024 election cleared the House, with the help of several Democrats.
The SAVE Act would force election officials to verify citizenship of voters. It has the strong backing of Donald Trump who urged the House to pass it, or else ‘go home and cry yourself to sleep.’
Speaker Mike Johnson insisted legislation to make voters prove their citizenship could be one of the ‘most important’ bills to go through Congress in a lifetime.
‘This will be one of the most important votes that members of this chamber will ever take in their entire careers,’ he said on the House floor Wednesday.
‘And it’s an issue we never thought we would have to actually address, but that moment has come to us now,’ he added.
Interestingly, five Democrats helped get the bill across the finish line in the House 221-198. But it faces a certain death in the Democrat-controlled Senate and President Biden has also threatened to veto the legislation.
Migrants walk through the Chihuahua Desert in Juarez, Mexico, on July 5, 2024
Speaker Mike Johnson, flanked by Rep. Chip Roy, insisted legislation to make voters prove their citizenship could be one of the ‘most important’ bills to go through Congress in a lifetime
The speaker added: ‘Should Americans and Americans alone determine the outcome of American elections? Or should we allow foreigners and illegal aliens to decide who sits in the White House and in the People’s House and in the Senate?’
The five Democrats who joined all Republicans in voting for the bill include Reps. Henry Cuellar, Texas, Don Davis, North Carolina, Jared Golden, Maine, Vicente Gonzalez Jr., Texas, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Washington.
Most voting ballots require some kind of proof of identity to register to vote, such as a driver’s license. Not all of those proofs of ID require citizenship – the bill would specifically require ID requirements like passports or birth certificates.
A sampling from 2002 to 2022 of over 1 billion ballots found fewer than 100 cases of voter fraud.
Democrat Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., said the bill is an ‘overt effort’ to ‘make Americans believe elections are rife with faud,’ calling it a ‘scare tactic.’
Johnson joined Trump world heavyweights Stephen Miller and Hogan Gidley and Rep. Chip Roy to get the legislation across the finish line in the House.
The speaker previously couldn’t disclose the exact number of non-citizens who have voted in elections, but had warned the number could be ‘dangerously high.’
‘We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that,’ he said at a press event in May.
Non-citizens who vote in federal and state elections are already breaking the law and putting themselves at risk of jail or deportation. A small handful of municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont allow illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.
But federal law currently prohibits requiring documentary proof of citizenship in federal elections. Arizona requires it for state elections.
A migrant walks through the Chihuahua Desert in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
‘We now have so many non citizens in the country that if only one out of a hundred of those voted, they would cast hundreds of thousands of votes,’ Johnson told reporters. ‘This is a dangerously high number’
‘If a nefarious actor wants to intervene in our elections, all they have to do is check a box on a form and sign their name. That’s it. That’s all that’s required,’ Johnson said.
Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, called the bill the ‘most important vote that most members of Congress take in their entire careers.’
‘If this bill does not become law then Joe Biden and Democrats will have engineered, one of the greatest interferences in any democratic nation in the history of the world.’
The bill would aim to close any loopholes that allow people to register to vote without proof of US citizenship or photo ID, require all 50 states to remove any unlawful immigrants from their voter rolls, add penalties of up to five years in prison for election officials who register non-citizens to vote and require proof of citizenship for those who vote overseas.
Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, called the bill the ‘most important vote that most members of Congress take in their entire careers’
There’s little evidence that non-citizen voting is impacting election outcomes, and unlawful immigrants often steer clear of giving out personal information for fear or being caught by immigration authorities.
It is possible to vote illegally as an undocumented immigrant, though.
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .
