Sen. Mike Lee Cites Reuters Finding of 30,000 Noncitizens on Voter Rolls to Push Stalled Election Bill

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, used a Senate floor speech Wednesday to renew his push for the SAVE America Act after a Reuters review found that more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens had been added to voter rolls across the country since 2000.

Reuters reported that the erroneous registrations occurred in California, Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Virginia. The outlet attributed the mistakes to “software glitches and clerical errors,” saying its review pointed to “inadvertent bureaucratic failures, rather than organized efforts to register immigrants illegally.” Reuters also said it could not determine how many noncitizens actually cast ballots and cautioned that the totals are imprecise because state data is “often tentative and subject to revision.”

Lee, who introduced the SAVE America Act earlier this year, argued the report undercuts claims that noncitizen voting is rare or nonexistent.

“That thing that they claim never happens, voter fraud or noncitizen voting, just keeps happening over and over and over again,” Lee said.

He said current law bars noncitizen voting in theory but is “rendered difficult and essentially impossible to enforce” in practice, largely because states rely on an “honor system” of self-attestation when people register to vote.

Lee drew a comparison to a popular restaurant chain’s all-you-can-eat pasta promotion, which requires customers to show identification.

“It should not be any easier for someone to get away with voter fraud at a polling location on voting day than it is to cheat Olive Garden through its never-ending pasta pass,” Lee said. “And yet, that’s exactly where we are today.”

The Reuters findings follow a separate disclosure by New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill that 6,600 self-identified noncitizens were registered to vote in that state, with fewer than 400 of them casting ballots.

Lee is pitching the SAVE America Act, which has President Donald Trump’s support and has already passed the House, as the fix. The bill would require registrants to verify citizenship and eligibility when they register and would mandate voter ID and photo identification at polling places. It remains stalled in the Senate.

Don Palmer, senior legal fellow for election integrity at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital that improving citizenship verification at driver’s license agencies could offer a bipartisan path forward, separate from requiring documentary proof of citizenship at registration.

“This story really provides proof that one way forward is to simply upgrade and sort of help the driver’s license agencies across the country improve their verification of citizenship while they’re providing those services to voters,” Palmer said. “I think that that would be a bipartisan way of improving that verification of citizenship with databases, and I think there’s some bipartisan support for that.”

Palmer added, referencing Lee’s restaurant analogy: “All joking aside with the Olive Garden scenario, I love their food and I’m more than happy to show the I.D., I think the issue is I wish that the driver’s license agencies and state agencies would take voter registration as serious as Italian food.”