Finally, the federal government is taking noncitizen voting seriously. 

Congress made it a crime years ago, but you wouldn’t have known it because the law was rarely enforced.

This year, federal agents have arrested multiple aliens who were registering and voting in California. Expect Operation Protect the Vote to find more.

For years, American institutions turned a blind eye to aliens on the voter rolls. Times are changing, and aliens who thought they could get away with voting would be wise to reconsider.

Those on the organized left pretended noncitizen voting was a fairy tale. They still do.

The lack of prosecutions wasn’t because of a lack of aliens on California voter rolls. They have been visible to anyone who wanted to ask the right questions.

Sanctuary city policies make the problem worse. San Francisco is one of many in California. There, Elizaveta Shuvalova, a Russian citizen, registered to vote. She was registered to vote until she returned an absentee ballot that said, “I am a Russian citizen!”

The Public Interest Legal Foundation documented the relation between California sanctuary city policies to hundreds of aliens ending up on the rolls.

Sanctuary city policies made the problem of aliens registering and voting worse.

In Oakland, aliens actually told election officials on the voter registration form that they were not citizens, but they were registered anyway. 

That’s how ridiculous things were before the change in enforcement policies by the Trump administration. Aliens begged to be removed from the rolls, because the federal government wasn’t doing its job across the decades.

Over and over, the system broke down. 

California election laws are notorious for doing everything the opposite of what they should do for clean elections. Automatic registration, automatic mail voting, mail ballots without safeguards — these policies make California elections a mess.

Enacting Prop. 39 would be a rare improvement in California elections. It would ensure mail-in ballots are actually being voted by the proper registered voter and that in-person voters are who they say they are. 

Voter ID is wildly popular among every racial and political demographic. Black, white, Democrat, Republican — all have majorities that support Voter ID. 

Voter ID is an election-law issue that the institutional left is losing. 

The feds have provided California with data purporting to contain the names of 20,000 possible aliens on the voter rolls. That’s an astounding number, if accurate. 

There are multiple ways that lists of aliens invite false positives. One is naturalization. The “alien” on a list has since naturalized and is now a citizen. The other is that Virginia, for example, removed American citizens because of inconsistent answers to DMV questions.

Accompanying these data is a lawsuit, demanding that California quarantine suspected noncitizens’ ballots — and determine their eligibility before those ballots are counted.

Good luck. Courts have been uniformly hostile to lawsuits that shake up the state of play right before an election. Federal law also has a 90-day freeze where voters cannot be booted off the rolls before an election — and quarantining ballots is likely akin to booting voters from the rolls. 

The Supreme Court will decide whether removing noncitizens is a systematic process barred within 90 days of an election.

Speaking from experience, government lists of aliens are often filled with false positives. I learned this the hard way when Virginia provided me with a list of over 6,000 “removed as noncitizens,” except they all weren’t noncitizens.   

But just because lists of aliens aren’t perfect doesn’t mean governments should ignore the law. It is commendable that the Trump administration is tackling a longstanding problem. We can get it right and only remove and prosecute actual aliens who are registered and voting.

Predictably, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is responding in a partisan way. He calls the effort to enforce the law “suppression.” Nonsense. 

What is partisan about allowing lawlessness to flourish in elections?

Finally, California is getting some help to fix the mess that officials there created.

J. Christian Adams is a commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights and president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

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