Opinion: The Democratic Party Exposes its True Allegiance

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

President Trump has issued an executive order requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.

It’s a simple enough requirement, as the Right has been reminding everyone for decades. You need to show your employment badge to use the employees’ entrance at most workplaces; you need to show your health insurance card to get your insurance company’s rates for healthcare. You need to show ID if you want your personal check accepted at a store; you need to show your ticket to enter a concert venue.

In short, if you want to take advantage of any privilege, you need to show that you’re entitled to it. You don’t get a privilege for free.

Nobody expects to enter an expensive concert without having bought a ticket. Nobody expects to buy alcohol without proving his age. If you put up a fight about it, you know you’ll be turned away by security, and possibly get arrested for it.

But as logical and self-evident as all that is, the Left has long expected elections to be the only issue that’s immune to such common sense.

The Democratic Party won’t admit it in so many words, but anyone can see that there can only be one reason to oppose measures that reduce the odds of vote fraud: the Democratic Party obviously knows it benefits from vote fraud.

There is no other reason to oppose a simple crackdown on the issue. None.

Ever since the days of the Roman republic, the concept of Citizenship has been a status of value. A citizen travels the world with the knowledge that foreign countries will think twice before mistreating him, because his government will stand up for him. A citizen has the protection of the written law when he’s at home, from basic civil rights to ownership of property, and government support if he needs to sue someone, to the critical rightsto a fair trial if he himself is accused of a crime.

But most of all – most importantly in this conversation – when you live in a constitutional republic, the right to vote is paramount.

The citizen is a party to the Constitution, the agreement that authorizes the very existence of his government. The citizen has a right to participate in the elections that staff that government. And the citizen has a right to be sure his vote counts fairly.

Fair elections aren’t just about getting the chance to cast a ballot; they are also about ensuring that the population doing the voting is a fully legitimate voter pool. Fair elections are really about having confidence that one’s vote won’t be cancelled out by a criminal who doesn’t deserve to participate.

If you have a right to show up and vote – for congress, for senate, for president, whatever – you also have an equally important right to be certain that all the other people voting in that election are also people who have the right to participate, the same as you.

There are about 8 billion people on earth, only about 320 million of whom are US citizens. Those other 7.8 billion people would love to be US citizens, but they aren’t. They can’t legally participate in our elections. And election officials are obligated to prevent them from doing so.

By the same token, fair and rational election laws restrict the vote further still.

· Most states don’t allow felons to vote, because they’ve forfeited the privilege.

· Most states don’t allow people to vote unless they have lived there a little while, usually a month, to ensure they are voting in the jurisdiction to which they belong.

· For half a century now, we have had a reasonable, nationally standardized minimum age for voting; you have to be at least eighteen.

· And no matter how many legitimate addresses you may have (your parents’ home and your college dorm, for example, or your summer home and your winter home, or your city home and your country cabin), you can only vote from one of them per election, not from all of them.

It’s all about ensuring that the Constitution – this long-established contract between American citizens – is respected. Only those who deserve to choose our government – by being legitimate parties to that contract – can cast a vote.

And none of this makes sense – none of it can possibly be called fair – if outside parties are allowed to dilute the votes of the deserving, by contaminating the voter pool with people who are not citizens.

Demanding that a voter pool be undiluted isn’t bigotry or unfairness, no matter how loudly and foolishly the Democrat shills in the media may make such claims. In fact, demanding that the voter pool be undiluted is the only way for any election to be legitimate.

Every time a child under 18 casts a vote in the United States, he’s canceling out an adult citizen’s vote. Is that fair?

Every time a citizen of Mexico or Venezuela, or Russia or China casts a vote in the United States, he’s canceling out an American citizen’s vote. Is that fair?

Even every time a citizen of a different state casts a vote for congressman or senator, that person is cancelling out the vote of legitimate residents of the state in question. As an Illinoisan, I have a right to help choose my district’s congressman and my state’s senator; I have no right to choose the congressman or senator for a district in Wisconsin, Indiana or Iowa. Just as they have no right to choose mine.

The Left screams – “Bigotry! Corruption! Lawlessness!” – so loudly that they hope to win the debate with sound and fury alone. But they cannot.

Our country has been flooded with some thirty or forty million illegal gatecrashers in just the past generation. Even if the Democratic Party didn’t actively try to get them to try to vote – and it’s silly to think that their voting wasn’t the primary reason the Democratic Party encouraged and eased their illegal border-jumping in the first place – the likelihood that some will try to vote on their own is simply undeniable.

We don’t know exactly how much vote fraud there is in America. It’s unknowable, since the corrupt politicians of our most heavily-populated jurisdictions (the big cities) refuse to look into it as a matter of self-preservation. But we know there’s a lot.

There is probably so much vote fraud that even the practitioners themselves would be shocked to see how much there is. A Heartland/Rasmussen poll of vote-by-mail voters found that at least 20% admitted to having committed at least one form of vote fraud in 2020, and many of those admitted to committing multiple kinds.

There are a lot of measures that could be implemented to reduce the fraud that disenfranchises legitimate voters. Mandating a certified driver’s license or state ID, requiring voter registration at least a month in advance, limiting elections to a single day, having a nationwide database to ensure that voters don’t vote twice in the same election, utilization of fingerprints or similar tests to ensure people don’t vote in other people’s names – there are almost countless methods available to reduce the odds of vote fraud, but some are expensive and many are strictly the purview of the states, outside the power of the federal government.

So, President Trump’s new executive order concentrates on issues that are well within the federal government’s authority.

We know when federal general elections will be held – the first Tuesday in November of even years – hundreds of years in advance. There’s no reason on earth for American citizens to be unable to get their ballot in on or by election day.

And we know that 96% of the world’s population – not being American citizens – are not legally allowed to participate in American elections. There’s no reason on earth to leave doors and windows open for those nearly 8 billion non-Americans to meddle in our elections.

There’s nothing hard about understanding these issues; there really isn’t even anything that a rational person could argue about. So the fact that the Left argues anyway, and does anything possible to thwart the effort, tells us more about them, and their motivations, than anything the politicians of the Right could ever say.

By trying to demand that non-citizens have a free hand at diluting the votes of American citizens, the Democrat Party exposes its true nature – as the enemy of the American citizen.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo