“After a self-identified noncitizen told the Minnesota state legislators, “We are voting,” the state’s top election official insisted that noncitizen voting isn’t a problem.
“Our office has no indication that noncitizen voting is a problem in Minnesota or nationally,” Cassondra Knudson, deputy communications director for Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, told The Daily Signal in an email Monday.
Simon, a Democrat, asked the Minnesota Legislature to pass bills this year to provide for automatic voter registration, to restore voting rights to felons, and to preregister 16- and 17-year-olds to vote.
“Between 2018 and 2021, only 62 adults were convicted of voting-related crimes in Minnesota, including voting while ineligible, registering while ineligible, or registering with the intent to vote in more than one precinct, according to the Minnesota judicial branch,” Knudson told The Daily Signal.
She noted that the state has 3.5 million registered voters.
At a Jan. 10 hearing held by the Minnesota House Transportation Finance and Policy Committee, a young woman named Angelico Bello was among numerous speakers on a bill to grant state driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.
“I’m a proud product of my mom. I’m also a DACA recipient,” Bello told the committee, referring to the federal program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. “As a DACA recipient, it has also been hard to have family members without a driver’s license.”
President Barack Obama issued the rule creating Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2012 to shield from deportation those brought unlawfully to the U.S. as children.
Bello went on to issue a warning to the Minnesota lawmakers during the hearing.”
Read more here at The Daily Signal
