More than 500 foreign nationals are registered to vote in Tuesday’s Washington DC congressional elections.
As of May 29, the most recent tally available, 523 foreign nationals living in Washington, DC, were registered to vote, Sarah Graham, spokesperson for the District of Columbia Board of Elections (DCBOE), told Fox News Digital.
Graham said this includes 310 Democrats, 28 Republicans, 16 members of the D.C. Green Party and 169 independent, foreign voters who are not registered with a political party.
Graham said the DCBOE does not collect data on the nationality of foreign voters. The Washington Post He addressed foreign voters from El Salvador, Iran and Ethiopia.
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A sign at an early voting site at Stead Park Recreation Center in Northwest Washington, DC, was photographed on May 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Robert Yun)
Just days before the June 4 Washington DC primary, 52 House Democrats joined Republicans in voting for a bill to overturn a Washington DC law allowing foreign nationals to vote in local elections in 2022. It is unclear whether the Democratic-controlled Senate will take up the bill, but the percentage of House Democrats supporting the measure is up from the 42 who voted to repeal the law last year.
The House Administration Committee has held two hearings in recent weeks to discuss how foreign voting could affect confidence in U.S. elections and pose risks to foreign interference.
“The Washington DC Board of Elections recently confirmed that nearly 500 foreign nationals have registered to vote in our nation’s capital, and that number is only growing. Early voting is currently underway for the DC Primary Election. And as we sit here today, foreign nationals are voting to elect DC City Council members. This is absurd,” Chairman Brian Steil (R-Wis.) said in opening statements last week.
“We have to do two things. One, we don’t allow the DC Citizens Vote law to spread across the US,” he said. “Second, we have to make sure that foreign nationals can’t vote in federal elections across the US. Right now, it’s illegal for foreign nationals to vote in federal elections, but it’s also illegal for them to evade the Border Patrol and enter the country illegally. And as we’ve seen, no one’s been able to stop that.”
In early voting for the D.C. Council Primary, 6,051 people have already voted in person at polling places across the precinct, 27,734 mail-in ballots have been received through the U.S. Postal Service, and an additional 18,492 ballots have been received through drop boxes, according to the latest numbers posted on the DCBOE website.
House Administration Committee Chairman Brian Steele (R-Wis.) has been holding hearings in recent weeks about concerns about foreign nationals voting across the United States. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
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As of April 30, 450,750 people were registered to vote in the capital.
Graham explained that the numbers are tallied monthly, so the most recent data available is from April, because May ended four days ago and DC’s municipal elections are on Tuesday.
Last year, Abel Amene, an Ethiopian immigrant, became the first foreign national to be elected to public office in Washington, D.C., when he was elected unopposed as an advisory district committeeman for the 4th Ward.
Abel Amene, Advisory District Committee Member for the 4th Ward and the first foreigner to hold public office in Washington, D.C., smiles after voting early in his district election on May 31, 2024. (Jenny Gathright/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“I would say the foreign vote is as American as apple pie. It’s been part of the fabric of America for centuries,” Ameneh argued. Interview with WUSA Last week he said: “We pay taxes, we might be conscripted so I’m not sure where the argument is. We can’t take part in federal elections. The only people we want to vote for are the ANC and members of parliament.”
Another foreign voter, Shagaeh Khris Rostampour, who moved to the U.S. from Iran in 2018 to attend graduate school at Brandeis University and then moved to Washington, D.C. for work, argued that undocumented immigrants who are registered to vote in local elections wouldn’t risk breaking the law to vote at the federal level.
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“People who are students and have visas or work visas, people who are on the path to citizenship, people seeking asylum, people who are in the country illegally, if it’s illegal to vote in a federal election, they’re not going to take the risk of registering a ballot and risk losing everything they’ve done and all the sacrifices they’ve made to cast a vote that doesn’t get counted,” Rostampour said in an interview with WUSA.
At a hearing last week, Steele argued that allowing foreign nationals to vote in local elections “continues to create challenges for states in maintaining clean voter rolls.” He noted that the committee discovered a week ago that Ohio’s voter rolls contained 137 foreign nationals, and cited the example of Virginia removing 1,481 foreign nationals from its voter rolls in May 2023.
