It’s being reported that the voter turnout in Illinois in 2018 was even higher than already suspected. This was not all accounted for by enthusiastic citizens trudging out in the cold to cast their ballots, however. In a story that’s been repeated often enough to become tiresome, the state has admitted that their “motor voter” system registered a significant number of non-citizens to vote. And some unknown number of them took advantage of the opportunity. (Free Beacon)

A watchdog group has requested records from the Illinois State Board of Elections after 574 noncitizens were added to its voter rolls, allowing some of them to vote illegally in the 2018 midterm elections. The Public Interest Legal Foundation [PILF], an election integrity law firm, made the request on Thursday after the board admitted the error. The individuals in question were improperly invited onto the rolls through a glitch in the state’s automatic voter registration system while applying for a driver’s license or state identification. The watchdog says Democratic politicians are pushing automatic voter registration at the expense of election integrity.

PILF has been doing some admirable work in exposing these systemic failures over the years. And this wasn’t the first time that the state of Illinois has been forced to publicly eat crow over this problem. PILF previously found more than 200 non-citizens in Chicago who were registered to vote. Out of this batch of 574, 19 have been confirmed to have cast ballots in 2018.

Critics will immediately jump up and say that 19 people out of a population the size of Illinois’ is only a drop in the bucket. So if illegal voting is so rare, there’s no need to do away with the motor voter system or require voter ID. But those 19 were only the ones who self-reported that they had committed the crime. The true number is unknown and couldn’t be determined without a thorough review of the voter records.

Seemingly everywhere that the motor voter system is implemented, these types of problems quickly follow. We’ve seen it in Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio, among others. Heck, there was one illegal alien in California who voted in as many as twenty straight elections. (You almost have to admire the dedication. I know many citizens who can’t match that record.)

This problem was probably best summed up by one officer at PILF who said, “States have no business experimenting with automatic voter registration until they can zero out the risk of ineligible noncitizens passing through traditional Motor Voter.” That much should have been self-evident all along, but for nearly twenty states it apparently wasn’t.