Amazingly, the idea of confining our republic’s elections to actual citizens has become controversial. It shouldn’t be; there’s nothing unreasonable about confining American politics to Americans and preventing non-Americans from influencing U.S. politics.
But the very idea of requiring proof of citizenship, or even an identification, to register for or to cast a vote is hotly argued. Now, in Missouri, a labor union is seemingly sending election materials pushing members to support the Harris-Walz ticket, and some of those members are not American citizens.
Union mailers have been sent to non-U.S. citizen migrant workers, saying, “Stop the Steal by stopping Trump’s allies. Vote for Harris-Walz and pro-worker candidates.”
A St. Louis area landscaping business alerted us that they’d received 11 of the mailers—addressed to their migrant workers, non-U.S. citizens. The business asked to remain anonymous.
The company’s manager told us their migrant worker employees, who are from Mexico, are all background checked and have legal H2B visas, which allow their temporary stay in the states. The manager explained the migrant workers are also allowed to have union representation – and that they pay dues to the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA) – but the manager cannot understand why the union would send mailers to non-U.S. citizens encouraging their vote in the presidential election.
This does appear to be more of a bureaucratic oversight on the part of the union, rather than an actual attempt to push non-citizens to vote:
Though the union did not respond to our report, the Missouri Democratic Party wrote FOX 2: “LiUNA is the international organization of construction craft laborers, with more than 500,000 members across the country. All unions routinely send information and mail to their members on various issues, and some of those issues may not apply to them.”
In short, LiUNA sent a mass mailing to all their Missouri members, with no attempt to restrict it to citizens. That is, at most, an oversight.
But there’s a larger argument to be made here, a greater issue than the LiUNA sending a mass mailer to all of their members without troubling themselves as to their members’ immigration status.
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Missouri does require the presentation of identification before voting. But, while 35 states require the presentation of identification before voting, only 24 of those require a photo ID; the remaining 15 states do not require identification before voting. As for registration to vote, that’s somewhat more muddled; there are federal statutes prohibiting non-citizens from registering to vote, but it’s important to note that elections are managed not by the federal government, but by the states.
While this Missouri issue appears to be something of a tempest in a teapot, there is still the larger issue. One cannot function in our modern society without some form of identification. One cannot open a bank account, cash a check, buy a bottle of hooch or a pack of smokes, drive a car, apply for a loan, or apply for any government services or benefits without some form of identification.
There is no good argument for failing to require identification for voter registration or voting. None. The states that do not require identification are leaving their elections sadly and unforgivably unsecured.
