After voting in 24 straight federal elections in Texas, an illegal alien is going to prison, and then back to Mexico.
It’s about time. There could be 58,000 more where he came from.
“He’s been voting since at least 1994,” Bexar County elections administrator Jacque Callanen said of 75-year-old Enrique Salazar Ortiz.
Salazar appeared on registration rolls as Jesse H. Vargas Jr., who left Texas as a teenager. Salazar bought a copy of Vargas’ birth certificate at a San Antonio bar for $20. A faithful voter, Salazar also appeared to be a frequent drinker. He was convicted three times for drunken driving, but was never deported.
Ironically, Salazar’s bogus voter registration – and his illegal status — went undetected because he regularly went to the polls.
“The best way to keep to keep an illegal voter registration is to use it. That avoids the purge of inactive voters,” said Logan Churchwell of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), an election integrity watchdog.
“Voting regularly keeps the county from sending an ‘inactive voter’ inquiry letter that requires you to engage with them. If you’re living with someone else’s identity, the last thing you want is someone asking you about it,” he explained.
Salazar’s illegal status came to light when he applied for a U.S. passport. That triggered questions from the State Department about his identity, and it “cascaded down all the way to the illegal voting level,” Churchwell said.
Casting ballots in plain sight is a disturbing aspect of a Texas-sized illegal-voting iceberg. Four days after Salazar’s conviction, Secretary of State David Whitley dropped a bomb: 58,000 non-citizens had voted in one or more Texas elections since 1996.
Whitley’s yearlong canvass of Texas voter rolls indicated that as many as 95,000 non-citizens may hold voter registrations. State Attorney General Ken Paxton promised to investigate and prosecute illegal voting activity.
Texas law requires registered voters to show one of seven forms of photo ID: a Texas driver’s license or handgun license, a U.S. passport, U.S. military ID card, U.S. citizenship certificate or a DPS-issued personal ID card or election identification certificate. Casting a ballot when not eligible to vote is a second-degree felony that carries a prison term of two to 20 years.
As part of a plea bargain in Salazar’s case that resulted in a 30-month sentence, federal prosecutors dismissed charges of false presentation of U.S. citizenship and unlawful possession of a firearm.
In 2016, PILF found 12 Texas counties had more registered voters than voting-age adults. Most of the counties were in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley, along the Mexican border.
State Sen. Don Huffines, R-Dallas, last year called for statewide registration purges of illegal aliens and non-citizens. Huffines was defeated in his re-election bid by a Democrat in November.
As for Salazar, he hopes for the best after he serves his time behind bars and is finally sent back to Mexico. “Though I’m 75 and without a penny … I take pride that I leave my daughter here,” he said.
5 Comments
There has to be an answer. But a good start would be to stop anyone from hiring. Place a $10,000.00 fine on any person who hires an illegal foreign national. Money used for immediate deportation within 72 hrs. with all your immediate family ALL S.S #’s COULD BE REMOVED plus voters registration could be removed from a national data base . That could be entered by the local coroner office.
These are only possible suggestions But first the Wall, Barriers Mile high fence is only start to help solve the problem at the borders. We must control the immigration & change some of the laws . Most need to roll back to pre- 1960’s changes. Others like NO ANCHOR BABIES. NO WELFARE , health care or educations , drivers license NO CHAIN IMMIGRATION
It use to be when you immigrated you were totally vetted. You had to have a job & enough funds to keep you for a certain amount of time
It use to be legal immigrates use to have to report every year in January, Also if you moved & change address or work in that year you had 30 days to report. The government use to know where the legal immigrants & college visa people were
Then democrat Ted Kennedy the you know what of the Kennedy clan pushed to change all that so he could not look like a failure in the eyes of his father , But his usual screw up
Bob , I like legal murder That what a friend of mine did for our government while he worked under many presidents. This country it leaders and most of it’s people are not tough enough. You can’t make everyone happy and if you cant kill them and the world will be a better place. I am 77 and Trump will be our last president after one more 4 years. The earth would a better and more productive plantent if we got rid of alot of people that have little purpus but cost us money. I am really fed up with the give away my country. There are alot of septic tanks the could really help with IMMIGRATION CONTROL in four years suck them out with the rest of the ****.
ID please: DriversLisc, other ID, No ID, No Vote.
Statewide, Nationwide
Or lose more elections to Dems
Ops, “these illegal voters, I meant” what a typo… Not allowed to edit here…
How could this illegal voters be stopped? USA is well equipped with technologies to enable to investigate the legitimacy of each voter. There must be a way to run reports of the voters’ names with matching SSN numbers since all the Voters must be tracked down through SSN numbers. However way it is performed, we must only allow the US citizens to vote. How about using our last four SSN as our ID pin to log in to vote at the voting precincts? Oh boy, just too complicated, we don’t know who really deserved to win in the several years of elections.