Polizette:

In some cases, aliens and permanent residents will register to vote and either admit on the form they are not citizens, or they will mislead, according to Christian Adams, general counsel for the foundation. Local officials can check each voter later by matching data from the Virginia driver’s license bureaus, where the aliens in question are usually likely not to mislead authorities on their status.

It's how some of the non-citizens were caught. The report lists all of the 1,046 non-citizens by name.

The disclosure is a major problem for Virginia and the nation. One thousand votes or so is enough to swing a close election in the state. In 2013, the Democratic candidate for attorney general won by fewer than 1,000 votes.

It's also not inconceivable that a presidential race could come down to 1,000 votes or less, as happened in Florida in 2000. Like Florida, Virginia is considered a swing state.

The Virginia Voters Alliance looked into the issue first with Alexandria, Virginia. The alliance noticed that the Northern Virginia city had more people registered to vote than eligible voters who lived there.

The alliance found 70 non-citizens had registered. The non-citizens had been purged from the voter rolls — but in some cases, had voted in the interim.

Adams said the watchdog group moved the investigation wider and soon met resistance. Adams said Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat and an old friend of Hillary Clinton, told a key staffer to advise officials in other Virginia localities to ignore Adams' requests for information.

The problem of non-citizens is likely worse than what the alliance found in eight Virginia localities.

"The problem is most certainly exponentially worse because we have no data regarding aliens on the registration rolls for the other 125 Virginia localities," the report reads. "Even in this small sample, when the voting history of this small sample of alien registrants is examined, nearly 200 verified ballots were cast before they were removed from the rolls. Each one of them is likely a felony."