53 percent of Democrats believe illegal immigrants should have the right to vote in U.S. elections

According to a new poll from Rasmussen Reports, 53 percent of Democrats believe illegal immigrants should have the right to vote in U.S. elections so long as they pay taxes. Although the number is significantly lower, 21 percent of Republicans believe the same. The majority of the country, 60 percent, believe illegal immigrants should not have the right to vote. From the survey:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that one-out-of-three Likely U.S. Voters (35%) now believes that illegal immigrants should be allowed to vote if they can prove they live in this country and pay taxes. Sixty percent (60%) disagree, while five percent (5%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Fifty-three percent (53%) of Democrats think tax-paying illegal immigrants should have the right to vote. Twenty-one percent (21%) of Republicans and 30% of voters not affiliated with either major political party agree. 

Earlier this year, secretaries of states from Kansas and Ohio sounded the alarm over President Obama's December 2014 executive action giving illegal immigrants the ability to vote in elections. 

"I want to bring to your attention my concern that the President’s recent Immigration Accountability Executive Actions will make it more difficult for elections officials to determine if all voters meet the primary standard for voting – U.S. citizenship. I am not here to debate immigration policy or the President’s executive actions. However, I am here to emphatically say that we cannot follow both the federal law and the executive action and ensure the integrity of the elections process without further assistance from Congress and the Obama administration," Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said to the House Oversight Committee in February. "For an estimated four to five million non-citizens, the President’s executive actions provide access to Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses. These are the same documents that federal law requires the states to recognize as valid forms of identification for voter registration. Under federal law, anyone with a valid Social Security number or driver’s license number can register to vote, provided they attest that they are a U.S. citizen. However, there is no way for us to validate this citizenship statement, since under the executive actions previously undocumented non-citizens will have access to the same documents as U.S. citizens. The issue becomes especially complicated in states like Ohio where millions of dollars are spent on third - party voter registration drives where no election official would be present to make clear the eligibility requirements for voting." 

"The problem of aliens registering to vote is a massive one, nationwide. And I have seen it firsthand in Kansas. Because there is no way of scanning a state's voter rolls and identifying which of the registered voters are aliens, determining the exact number of aliens on the voter rolls in virtually impossible. But we know that the number is significant, because specific election episodes present evident of aliens voting and because we gain some information by matching driver's license databases against voter rolls," Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said during the same hearing. "Based on the empirical evidence that I have seen as the Kansas Secretary of State, it is a certainty that the Administration's executive actions will result sin a large number of additional aliens registering to vote throughout the country, in violation of state and federal law. These are irreversible consequences, because once an alien registers to vote, it is virtually impossible to detect him and remove him from the list of registered voters." 

And as a reminder: 

A Cooperative Congressional Election Study released in October 2014 found, "more than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010." 

You can bet Obama's executive amnesty wasn't simply about "bringing people out of the shadows." Instead, it was about bringing illegal immigrants to the polling booth to vote for Democrats.