That thing that never happens . . . keeps happening: Noncitizens voting in US elections.

Federal attorneys in Washington state just identified 400-plus noncitizens registered to vote; some allegedly have been voting for years — but Democrats won’t abandon their “nothing to see here” line.

Indeed, Dems’ Senate and House leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, this month sued to stop the Executive Branch drive to clean up state voting rolls. 

The Washington news comes on the heels of the Justice Department push to set aside 20,000 mail-in California votes so the voters’ citizenship can be verified before the votes get counted.

And the almost 1,600 potential noncitizens found registered in North Carolina in September, atop the 1,000-plus noncitizens dug up in Ohio last fall, of which close to 170 had voted federally.

New Jersey registered almost 7,000 noncitizen voters, Texas more than 2,000 possible noncitizens, and on and on down the list.

That’s to say nothing of Minnesota, where one registered voter can “vouch” for eight — yes, eight — ID-less voters (an invitation for noncitizens to vote if ever there was one).

Stop asking questions! Argue the Democrats and their media surrogates.

First, it just wasn’t happening: NPR in 2024 called concern over noncitizen voting a “baseless claim” and a “conspiracy theory.” 

Then it became extremely rare — witness the recent New York Times headline: “How Claims of Widespread Noncitizen Voting Fall Apart.”

From Washington to Cali to Texas to Jersey: How far must it spread to count as “wide”?

Cue a new talking point: No one’s proved this is all an official Dem-run election-crime racket, so it’s  . . . fine? 

Of all the Justice Department’s work in ID’ing noncitizen voters, “none of the cases includes allegations of an organized effort by Democrats or anyone else to cheat by drawing noncitizens to the polls,” The Washington Post sniffed Wednesday — as if that somehow legitimizes an election system with mile-wide holes in it.

At this rate, expect to soon see a raft of “Yes, voter fraud is happening — here’s why that’s a good thing” think pieces.

Yes, the numbers uncovered so far aren’t enough to swing major races.

Minor ones, yes: In ultra-blue New Brunswick, City Councilmember Matt Ferguson recently won by just 88 votes; in April, Hortonville, Wisc. resolved a tied village-trustee race with a coin toss. 

More important: What we know already is only the tip of the iceberg.

Surely Democrats, who’ve made election-security concerns central to their platform since at least 2004 — and have doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on that in the Trump era — can find something substantial to say? 

With thousands of noncitizen registrations now established, along with noncitizen voting in at least the hundreds, “nothing to see” won’t fly.

Yet prominent Democrats like Jeffries, Schumer, Cali Gov. Gavin Newsom and Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill deny it’s an issue even as they duck any responsibility for it. 

The relentless denials — and obstruction of efforts to find the full truth — suggest that Democrats at least believe illegal voters represent a key constituency for them.

And it all undermines voters’ faith, an erosion that can build to disastrous civic consequences down the line.

Free, fair elections are the sine qua non of democracy: The party that’s spent a decade howling about assaults on our political norms needs to acknowledge that noncitizen voting is just such a deadly attack.