Kamala Harris has made election integrity a big talking point ahead of the midterms. The former vice president’s latest claims of cheating raise an obvious question: Does she object to voter-roll maintenance itself, or can she identify a lawful safeguard she actually supports?
At an appearance in South Korea last week, the former vice president alleged “overt cheating” in American elections, citing voter-roll purges. In September, she accused officials of “cheating by purging voter rolls.” Over the summer, she also criticized the SAVE America Act for requiring documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.
Harris can keep calling voter-roll purges ‘cheating.’ But California’s unanswered questions and New Jersey’s documented registration failure demand more than talking points.
Harris wants to turn basic election safeguards into the boogeyman of election administration. But isn’t the point to ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections?
Election officials must not improperly remove eligible voters. They also have an obligation to identify ineligible registrations. Harris talks about purges without making that distinction. Americans deserve to know which safeguards she opposes and why.
Start with California, Harris’ home state. On Monday, the Justice Department charged 28 lawful permanent residents with federal election-related offenses, including fraudulent registration and illegal voting. Eleven were arrested. The charges are allegations, not convictions, but the cases warrant serious attention.
Federal prosecutors say all 28 appeared on a list of more than 20,000 people the government believes are likely noncitizens registered in California. The Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security sued the state on October 15, seeking to stop ballots attributed to people on that list from being counted until their citizenship is verified.
Governor Gavin Newsom (D) called the lawsuit an attempt to “suppress California voters.” The state should be able to show how it verifies eligibility and corrects its rolls.
It cannot. A separate public records response exposes an accounting problem: California’s statewide voter-registration system “does not contain a voter status reason for cancellation due to non-citizenship.” The state could not provide a count of registrations canceled for that specific reason. Why not?
New Jersey supplies an even clearer example of why verification cannot be an afterthought. In July, Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) acknowledged that a “serious software error” had registered approximately 6,600 people who answered “no” when asked whether they were U.S. citizens during motor vehicle transactions. The “error” occurred between June 2023 and June 2024.
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A subsequent state accounting found that about 340 newly registered people had actually voted. New Jersey claims it has no evidence that those votes changed an election result. That does not excuse a system that registered people after they expressly declined to attest to citizenship.
At a House Judiciary hearing in September, I noted that at least three New Jersey elections in 2025 were decided by a single vote or ended in a tie. When a race is that close, election officials cannot shrug off registration errors.
New Jersey voters understand the stakes. A Rutgers-Eagleton poll released this month found that 82% of state residents support requiring photo ID to vote in person, while 71% favor documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register.
Even Sherrill has expressed support for voter ID. That requirement establishes identity; proof of citizenship establishes eligibility. They serve different purposes, and neither question should be brushed aside with a slogan about voter suppression.
Minnesota has its own lesson in the need for clear rules. Governor Tim Walz (D) signed a 2023 law that lets residents get standard driver’s licenses without proving lawful immigration status. During an October 2025 legislative hearing, state Rep. Patti Anderson (R) pressed state elections director Paul Linnell on whether those licenses could be used as voter identification. He failed to give a direct yes-or-no answer.
Minnesota does permit a driver’s license as proof of residence for Election Day registration. Citizenship eligibility is a separate requirement. Election officials should be able to explain the distinction simply, especially when lawmakers ask about vulnerabilities.
Accurate voter rolls, citizenship verification, and clear identity rules protect the votes of eligible Americans. Officials should explain how those safeguards work and correct failures when they find them.
Harris can keep calling voter-roll purges “cheating.” But California’s unanswered questions and New Jersey’s documented registration failure demand more than talking points. If she believes these safeguards are improper, she should explain which ones — and what she would do instead.
U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told an audience at the University of Chicago that she wants future investigations of Trump administration officials to send a deterrent message. Young people considering jobs in a Republican administration, she said, should wonder whether joining it might buy them “a ton of problems.”
Slotkin describes her proposal as accountability for corruption. But listen to the threat embedded in her political strategy: Make public service under the wrong president so frightening that talented young conservatives never enter government. She said the quiet part out loud, and conservatives would be fools to ignore it.
If the system is fraying, the worst response is to abandon every position of legitimate authority while the other side organizes.
The peaceful transfer of power depends on losers believing they can survive defeat and return to fight another election. That assumption is eroding.
From the Bush-Gore recount to birtherism, Russiagate, and the battles over COVID-era voting rules, every disputed election has taught Americans to question the legitimacy of the next result. A political system cannot endure indefinitely when losing means permanent exclusion, financial ruin, or the threat of prosecution.
Eventually, the incentive to win at any cost overwhelms the willingness to accept defeat. The ballot is supposed to decide who holds office, not which faction gets to use the state to erase its rivals.
Donald Trump accelerated that deterioration because he inspires a peculiar derangement in his enemies. Progressives convinced themselves that Trump was a fascist dictator preparing a thousand-year Reich. They portrayed ordinary political disagreements as existential emergencies and justified extraordinary tactics as necessary resistance.
The campaign to stop Trump continued after he left office. His opponents pursued lawsuits, criminal cases, and ballot challenges designed to prevent his return. Conservatives watched the machinery of politics become an instrument for destroying the opposition. The law may permit a particular lawsuit or prosecution. That does not mean Americans should be comfortable watching every political contest turn into a criminal investigation.
Trump also survived two assassination attempts in 2024. The atmosphere of political hatred should disturb anyone who expects elections to settle disputes without bloodshed. Instead, much of the left treats Trump's second administration as an even more terrifying prospect because he has learned something from the first: Personnel determine whether a president can govern. The specter of Cheeto Hitler now excuses an endless war against anyone who might help him.
Trump entered Washington in 2017 without understanding how thoroughly permanent bureaucracies could frustrate his agenda. Officials who considered themselves guardians of the government against its elected leader resisted him from within. This time he has pursued loyal appointments and executive action aggressively.
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Progressives understand that a Republican administration staffed by people committed to its program is harder to neutralize than one staffed by its enemies. So the fight has shifted from Trump himself to the Americans willing to serve him.
That is what makes Slotkin's remarks so revealing. Young graduates already face a difficult choice between a prosperous private career and the headaches of federal service. Now imagine telling them that four years at the Department of Justice or Homeland Security could lead to crippling legal bills once Democrats regain power. You need not imprison every conservative official. Ruin a few careers, and the next generation will learn to stay away. An opposition that cannot recruit competent personnel cannot govern, however many elections it wins.
Trump's greatest failure may be his refusal to impose meaningful costs on those who abused power against his movement. Anthony Fauci is not in prison. Officials who conservatives believe weaponized investigations have escaped accountability. Radical activists continue to operate, while prosecutions of political violence remain uneven at best. In repeated games, cooperation survives only when defection carries a price. Tit for tat is not a pleasant rule, but one side cannot endlessly punish the other while expecting restraint in return. Without consequences, bad conduct becomes a winning strategy.
The danger reaches beyond staffing.
Researcher Jennica Pounds, known online as DataRepublican, has published recordings and documents she says reveal preparations for a constitutional crisis involving a network called the United Democracy Alliance. According to her account, former military, intelligence, and diplomatic figures have discussed scenarios in which contested elections, executive branch action against protests, and defiance by Democrat governors could trigger a challenge to federal authority.
DataRepublican interprets those preparations as the groundwork for a seizure of power. Her account describes proposed political red lines, including a federal response to mass protests, that could become triggers for a confrontation between governors and Washington.
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One can chalk up the recordings as contingency planning, but the distinction grows thin when political operatives begin gaming out how governors might seize power amid a constitutional crisis. Elections are supposed to settle who governs. Planning to declare Washington illegitimate when an election or federal response goes the wrong way raises the stakes beyond ordinary opposition politics. Conservatives cannot afford to treat that possibility as an abstraction. They should examine the recordings, demand public answers, and prepare to defend their institutions.
No sane person should welcome domestic unrest. A country in which each election threatens imprisonment, confiscation, and violence would become unrecognizable. Americans have spent generations assuming that partisan combat ends when the ballots are counted. That bargain cannot survive if each party views the other as an enemy to be destroyed. Conservatives should demand lawful accountability for genuine wrongdoing, defend constitutional procedures, and refuse the comforting fantasy that decorum alone will restore the old rules.
None of this is permission to withdraw from politics. It is a reason to become harder to exclude. Vote. Recruit candidates. Build institutions. Win local offices. Know your sheriff, your neighbors, and the people responsible for keeping order. Cultivate lawyers, administrators, and young professionals willing to serve despite intimidation.
If the system is fraying, the worst response is to abandon every position of legitimate authority while the other side organizes. Democracy may not survive in the form Americans remember. The power conservatives build now will determine whether they have any say in what follows.
I spent 24 years enforcing immigration law. I know what government looks like when officials stop taking enforcement seriously. In June, I wrote in Lyceum that Belfast's riots exposed a collapse of public trust and that lawful enforcement offered the peaceful way to restore it. France has now delivered another warning.
On October 17, masked rioters looted businesses and set fire to public buildings across France. Police made more than 2,400 arrests, and nearly 1,000 officers were injured, seven of them seriously. Cities imposed curfews. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez acknowledged that police had failed to anticipate the scale of the unrest and offered to resign. President Emmanuel Macron refused his resignation and publicly condemned the violence.
Publish the data regularly, explain what the numbers show, and let citizens judge. If the numbers support the policy, why hide them?
French officials blamed ultra-left militants and opportunistic looters. The protests began in September over the cost of living and deteriorating schools. More than half a million people marched on Oct. 17, most of them peacefully. I accept those facts. I do not accept that the government's explanation ends the inquiry. Officials who admit they failed to anticipate what happened on their own streets should expect the public to ask tougher questions.
Start with the government's own immigration figures. France issued about 377,000 first residence permits in 2025, up 9.2% from 2024, according to revised Interior Ministry figures. Permits issued for humanitarian reasons rose 56.8%. The increase is partly explained by protection for people fleeing conflict in Afghanistan and Ukraine. But who calculated the effects on the communities expected to absorb them?
Consider the schools, where the protests began. France’s 2026 plans eliminated more than 3,000 existing teaching positions in certain categories even as the Education Ministry budgeted thousands of other posts. Teachers complained about vacancies, and students described classes of 32 to 36. The ministry points to a historic decline in enrollment. I take it at its word. That makes it all the more important to show how officials reconcile nationwide enrollment projections with the needs of particular neighborhoods.
Who weighs residence permits against available classrooms, housing, local services, and employment? Who decides where resources will follow the people who arrive? If officials have made those calculations, publish them. A government that can count permits can explain their second- and third-order consequences. If it does not ask those questions, it cannot expect the public to believe it cares about the answers.
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Here is another test. France publishes residence permits by nationality, including the numbers issued to Moroccans and Afghans. After the riots, the Interior Ministry reported arrests, but I have not seen a comparable public breakdown of who was arrested. Publish the numbers and let the public assess them. Silence is no substitute for evidence.
Spain has felt its own pressures. In 2025, an assault on an elderly man in Torre Pacheco became the spark for several nights of anti-migrant clashes. In April this year, Madrid opened an extraordinary program to regularize undocumented migrants, originally expected to reach about half a million people. Housing protests intensified, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap election for November 29. I read these events as a bill coming due for political leaders who must answer for their decisions.
Belfast offered a more immediate example. On June 8, a man was stabbed, and a Sudanese asylum seeker was charged with attempted murder. Mobs then set fire to homes and a city bus. Lists of addresses supposedly belonging to immigrants circulated online. Police brought in reinforcements from Great Britain and used plastic bullets.
Attacking people because of where they live is a crime, and no immigration policy excuses it. But governments cannot ignore demands for public order and then profess surprise when disorder follows. I made that argument in Lyceum, and I stand by it.
Poland chose a different response. In March 2025, it suspended most asylum applications from people crossing its border with Belarus, strengthened border enforcement, and maintained a visible security presence. On October 18, Prime Minister Donald Tusk defended that policy, emphasizing border control and the removal of people who violate Polish law.
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Poland has not escaped demonstrations. Anti-immigration marches took place in more than 80 cities in July 2025, and police separated marchers from counterprotesters. But I have not found riots on the scale of Belfast or France. Critics note that the OECD put Poland's foreign-born population at only 2.2% in 2023. The country also hosts more than a million refugees from Ukraine, and human rights groups challenge its asylum restrictions. Poland proves neither that every restriction works nor that it has settled every concern. It does show a government acting openly on a question voters have pressed it to answer.
Americans should learn from this. Enforcement can rebuild trust; secrecy corrodes it. The Oversight Project sought deportation statistics from the Department of Homeland Security. According to an October 9 Daily Caller report, DHS supplied a fully redacted summary of voluntary departures. I called that a slap in the face, and I meant it.
France should explain its arrests and immigration decisions. The Trump administration should publish the deportation figures it uses to defend its record. Both governments ask the public to trust them. Publish the data regularly, explain what the numbers show, and let citizens judge. If the numbers support the policy, why hide them?
Cabaña Mexican Grill in Garden City, Kansas, temporarily closed last week as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted operations across the southwestern part of the state.
In a bilingual Facebook post featuring a Mexican flag, the restaurant said, “ICE is in our community, and fear is spreading through the families who work hard every day to keep businesses like ours running.”
Establishment Republicans, always preferring business interests over their voters, may not get the message by midterms. They may not ever get it. But the voters certainly do.
The post urged other businesses to stand with their employees: “People before profit. Community before business. Together.”
Kansas Republican U.S. Sens. Roger Marshall and Jerry Moran responded by stressing coordination between federal agents and local law enforcement.
“When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement,” Marshall posted to X. “Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe.”
Marshall said he was closely following events and had been in direct contact with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and local authorities “as ICE executes warrants in order to keep Kansans safe.”
Moran added that he had spoken with Mullin and stressed “the importance of DHS working with our local law enforcement to safely execute these warrants.”
He also relayed an assurance from Mullin that the warrants were “only for the purpose of arresting individuals who have been charged with criminal activities.”
Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton struck much the same note. He said immigration agents should focus on serious criminals, coordinate with local officials, and avoid leaving Kansas families afraid.
How strange that the Republicans and the Democrat should sound so similar, especially to voters who expect Republicans to offer an unapologetic defense of immigration enforcement.
Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on carrying out what he called “the largest deportation operation in American history.” More than 77 million Americans voted for him, and he carried Kansas by 16 points.
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Yet when federal immigration agents arrived in Southwest Kansas, the state’s two Republican senators did not lead with a defense of the administration’s enforcement authority. They led with concerns about coordination, local knowledge, and public safety — language strikingly similar to Hamilton’s.
That distinction is worth getting right.
ICE routinely works with state and local law enforcement, including through its 287(g) partnerships. Asking federal agents to communicate with sheriffs and police is not, by itself, a sanctuary policy, nor does local government possess a veto over federal immigration enforcement.
The real question is what Moran and Marshall believe ICE should be enforcing.
ICE is not merely a federal version of a local police department. Immigration enforcement is itself at the core of its mission. Removal does not depend in every case on a separate violent-crime conviction.
When Moran and Marshall say that ICE should be focusing on public safety or illegal aliens charged with criminal activity, what they seem to mean is that the overwhelming majority of illegal aliens should receive enforcement amnesty. That’s madness.
I don’t think it is even worth pointing out to either Republican senator that it is illegal for illegal aliens to work under the table in the United States, and usually that implicates other crimes, including identity theft and document fraud.
Logic cannot prevail when we are hearing Democratic talking points from the mouths of Republicans. This is particularly troubling at a time when some Democrats, including Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), are openly calling to abolish the Department of Homeland Security.
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Establishment Republicans, always preferring business interests over their voters, may not get the message by midterms. They may not ever get it. But the voters certainly do, particularly in areas that have been transformed by mass immigration, both legal and illegal.
Comments responding to a KSN story included blunt reactions: “The businesses hiring them should be fined and arrested,” “Sounds like they need to stay closed if they can’t hire Americans,” and from one Western Kansas resident, “I voted for this!!!”
Those comments are not a scientific sample of Kansas opinion, obviously. They are, however, a reminder of the constituency Republican politicians helped create when they spent years promising tougher immigration enforcement and failed to deliver.
Now that enforcement has arrived in Southwest Kansas, voters can see clearly how their elected officials respond.
According to DHS, Diawara 'oddly claimed he would be persecuted for homosexuality if returned home to Mali, and requested a withholding of removal from his home country.'
El-Sayed has his own string of controversies to grapple with.
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