by John Solomon and Natalia Mittelstadt
Georgia election officials conducted one of the most sophisticated ever audits of a state election database, identifying at least 20 foreigners who made it onto the voters rolls for the 2024 election and removing them before they could cast ballots, according to an internal memo obtained by Just the News.
The highly anticipated audit, which is due to be made public, flagged another 156 enrolled voters as possible noncitizens who need to be investigated further, the memo stated.
The non-citizens who were removed were detected by a novel effort that compared the voter rolls to other data sources, including juror affidavits in the county courts of Georgia where the individuals declared they were not eligible to serve as jurors because they were not U.S. citizens, officials told Just the News.
“All twenty of those voter registrations have been cancelled, and all of them are being referred to local law enforcement for prosecution,” an internal memo written by Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stated. “There are 156 people that require additional human investigation, and my office has opened up a case file into these individuals.”
The audit comes as the Biden-Harris administration has refused to help states clean their voter rolls by providing lists of noncitizens by state and has sued at least two states – Virginia and Alabama – for removing suspected non-citizens from their rolls. Florida recently sued the federal government to force the disclosure of noncitizen records to help keep election rolls clean.
Raffensperger has been one of the most vocal election officials in the country in urging aggressive audits to remove noncitizens, warning the open border has created a massive new temptation for foreigners to try to slip onto voter rolls.
Loopholes to fix
In April 2022, he conducted the first sweep in which Georgia election officials found that at least 1,634 noncitizens registered and tried to get on the rolls but were denied.
The new audit confirmed concerns among Georgia election officials that there are loopholes at the federal level that are being exploited to sneak noncitizens on voter rolls and that a few have gotten through. Raffensperger and other state’s election chiefs have been encouraging members of Congress to address these by reforming the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
“Elections are an ever-changing process, and as more technology becomes available, Georgia’s election security should grow with it,” Raffensperger’s memo recommended. “List maintenance is not a one-time activity, it is an ongoing process with incremental improvement. We need to remain constantly vigilant.”
“We are committed to ensuring that only U.S. citizens can vote in our elections through rigorous citizenship verification at the front end, and in maintaining the cleanest voter rolls in the nation through continuous list maintenance,” the memo added.
“However, federal laws continue to restrict when we can remove ineligible voters from our roles. I am once again calling on Congress to update the [National Voter Registration Act of 1993] so states have more ability to remove ineligible voters from the registration list.”
In February 2023, Raffensperger told Just the News that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) can prevent Georgia from cleaning its voter rolls “for 11 months” of the year during a presidential election cycle.
He said that the federal law prevents states from cleaning their voter rolls less than 90 days before a federal election.
Election Integrity Network Founder Cleta Mitchell told Just the News on Tuesday that state and federal law must be changed to ensure that noncitizens are not registered to vote.
“Insufficient safeguards”
“It demonstrates that there are insufficient safeguards to keep noncitizens off the voter rolls in the first place. That is going to require some changes in state and federal law, in every state, and changes in the way that election officials screen new registration applicants,” Mitchell said.
“It is high time that the whole process of verification of voter registrations be overhauled and a big part of that is to ensure that there are strong safeguards to keep noncitizens from being added, and that the identity and residency of every applicant is carefully reviewed and verified before being added to the rolls. Federal and state law require that now, but those laws and procedures clearly need to be strengthened and election officials must assist to protect the sanctity of the votes of the American citizens.”
Other states have also found and removed noncitizens on their voter rolls.
In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced that more than 1 million ineligible voters have been removed from voter rolls since 2021. Of those, more than 6,500 noncitizens were found, and about 1,930 of them have voted. The records of those 1,930 voters were in the process of being sent to the attorney general’s office from the secretary of state’s office for investigation.
In May, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) directed all 88 counties to begin a removal process for non-citizens on Ohio’s voter rolls following a review by his office’s Public Integrity Division and Office of Data Analytics and Archives. The review analyzed data from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and found 137 voter registrations of non-citizens who had twice confirmed their lack of U.S. citizenship.
In August, LaRose directed county election officials to remove another 499 non-citizens registered to vote from the state’s voter rolls.
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John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Just the News. Natalia Mittelstadt is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
