According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the federal government decided to only go after 35 criminal cases of aliens voting in American elections from 2001 to 2021 — the latest year for which data is available. //

Von Spakovsky spoke about his experience as an election official in Fairfax County, Virginia, where his oversight in 2011 discovered nearly 300 aliens on the voter rolls in just that county alone. His research further revealed that 117 of them had actually voted.

The Fairfax County election board reported its findings to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which is responsible for prosecuting such crimes. At the time, that section was headed by Jack Smith, the same lawfare attorney appointed by Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland to go after former President Donald Trump for posing questions about the integrity of the 2020 election.

“We took them off the rolls and then sent them over to DOJ, and DOJ did absolutely nothing about it,” von Spakovsky said. “They just ignored them.”

Despite reporting these people to the Justice Department at the time, BJS data shows that from 2010 to 2012 zero cases were brought under 18 U.S.C. 611: Voting by Aliens, a statute passed in the mid-1990s making it a crime for an alien to vote in federal elections. //

Last month, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Virginia had removed 6,303 noncitizens from its voter rolls, who had either “accidentally or maliciously” registered. Youngkin did not go into detail about whether those voters had ever voted, but his state was not the only one with thousands of noncitizens registered to vote.

In 2019, the state of Pennsylvania admitted it had registered nearly 12,000 noncitizens to vote. The same year, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley had similarly found 95,000 noncitizens registered to vote, and further that 58,000 of them had voted at some point since 1996.

Earlier this year, research group Just Facts published a study showing that between 10 percent and 27 percent of noncitizens, or about two to five million, are illegally registered to vote. For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.