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After an illegal immigrant was discovered to have been voting for more than a decade in Philadelphia, immigration experts are warning that the “system can fail” and that loss of voter confidence represents the true “serious threat” to American democracy.
In an interview with Digital, Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that “the most important thing is perception.”
“People have to believe that their vote counts. And so that’s, I think, a much more serious long-term threat,” said Hankinson.
“We have a perception in the United States,” he continued, “that elections were free and fair. If even the appearance of impropriety, the appearance of corruption, is bad enough to turn people off, to make people not interested in going to vote, to think, ‘Well, my vote doesn’t count anyway.’ Then that’s really what undermines democracy.”
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Mahady Sacko, a Mauritanian citizen living in the United States illegally, has fraudulently voted in every federal election dating back to 2008, federal prosecutors said. (Department of Homeland Security; Getty Images)
Earlier this week, Digital learned that Mahady Sacko, a Mauritanian citizen and illegal immigrant, allegedly voted in every federal election since 2008. He has been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and charged with voter fraud in Philadelphia. This comes as congressional lawmakers fiercely debate the SAVE Act, a measure proponents say would strengthen election integrity laws.
Despite being given a removal order in 2000, Sacko, 50, registered to vote in 2005 and falsely stated on several occasions that he was a U.S. citizen, authorities allege. The voting records showed that he cast ballots in the general elections in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. In addition, he voted in the 2016 and 2020 primary elections, prosecutors said.
Hankinson said that while he believes such cases are more isolated and are not widely prevalent in the U.S., it is a “potentially big problem, and it’s one that’s very easy to fix.”
“The average Joe who does vote doesn’t think he’s setting fire to his ballot. He thinks it’s actually going to count for something. That’s what’s at risk here,” Hankinson continued, adding, “That I think is a long-term serious threat to our democracy.”
Meanwhile, Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the election integrity research group True the Vote, told Digital that “an illegal alien allegedly voting in every presidential election since 2008 is proof the system can fail — and we have no reliable, codified way to determine how many others may be doing the same.”
“Millions could be voting illegally, but we don’t know because comprehensive voter roll audits are being fought tooth and nail, instead of being standard operating procedure,” she went on. “What’s most disturbing is how vicious the fight has become to block analyses, stop audits, and shut down even the most basic questions about eligibility and voter record maintenance.”
“That kind of resistance leaves millions of Americans with the unmistakable impression that something is very wrong in our system, and that feeling, that loss of trust, is likely the biggest impact of all.”
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Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, warned that “millions” could be voting illegally. (SETH HERALD/AFP via Getty Images and Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
She posited that “we should treat voter rolls the way serious industries treat sensitive record management.” She suggested bringing in independent third-party auditors, setting clear state and national standards, and using real-time verification of identity, residency, and citizenship as a matter of routine.
“The data exists, the technology exists, and other sectors use it every day — what’s missing is political will to apply those same basic safeguards to our elections,” she said.
On the other hand, in a statement shared with Digital, David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), said, “We have a very good sense of the depth of the problem here” and “it is extremely rare that noncitizens get registered, and it is infinitesimally rare that they vote.”
CEIR released its latest review of noncitizen registration and voting claims last month. That review concluded, “CEIR continues to find that sweeping allegations about noncitizen registrations or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data.”
Becker said that President Donald Trump’s “own Department of Homeland Security has checked more than 49 million voter records, and they themselves admit that 99.98% of those records represented confirmed citizens.”
He added that “in several states that are politically aligned with President Trump, the number of alleged noncitizen voters has precipitously dropped when subjected to scrutiny.”
“We see consistently that the number of potential or confirmed noncitizens registered is very small, and those who are voting are even smaller,” he said.
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Hans von Spakovsky expressed that “every vote by an alien cancels and effectively voids the vote of a citizen.” (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
However, Hans von Spakovsky, a former commissioner at the Federal Election Commission and a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, told Digital, “The point is that we have an honor system currently with most states doing absolutely nothing to verify citizenship. And we have hundreds of close elections all the time in this country where even a small number of aliens could make the difference in an election.”
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He shared information from his 2024 testimony to Congress in which he said that findings based on official registration records of thousands of aliens showed they are registered in various jurisdictions, including Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and sanctuary cities like Philadelphia and Chicago.
Despite these reports, he said, “virtually no prosecutors have expressed any interest in investigating and potentially prosecuting these aliens.”
“The indicators that it is occurring are there, and it is important to understand that every vote by an alien cancels and effectively voids the vote of a citizen,” he said.
Digital’s Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
