There’s much speculation and debate over whether non-citizens and others who are ineligible vote in U.S. elections, but relatively few documented instances. That makes this report by a local television station in Fort Myers, Florida all the more significant. The station’s investigation uncovered nearly one hundred non-citizens who were registered to vote, and several admitted to have cast ballots. The non-citizen voters were discovered because they said to be excused from jury service due to their lack of citizenship. The question now is whether this report is symptomatic of a larger problem in Florida, if not elsewhere, or a relatively isolated problem.
UPDATE: As noted in the comments below, the station supplemented the report with the following comment on its story:
People seem very interested in which party these ineligible voters were for, so let’s look at the numbers we have. We found 87 people who said they couldn’t serve on a jury but were registered to vote. Of those:
33 were registered as Democrats (3 inactive).
25 were registered as Republicans (1 inactive).
1 was a registered Independent.
20 were No Party Affiliation (1 inactive).
8 were unknown.
It’s a small sampling, so trying to extrapolate these numbers probably wouldn’t give you any reliable statewide percentage breakdown. But that’s what the data show.