GOP candidate for IN Secretary of State says he'll require Proof of Citizenship to vote

The Secretary of State’s race is shaping up to be the hottest race in Indiana this year, with at least two Republicans challenging Secretary of State Holli Sullivan, who was appointed to the position by Gov. Eric Holcomb.

One of them, Diego Morales, has been saying he’ll require proof of citizenship to vote.

He said it on Steve Bannon’s show on March 31: https://rumble.com/vz8vjg-diego-morales-the-indiana-secretary-of-state-for-maga.html

“I’m the only candidate who’s requesting proof of citizenship for everyone who will go to the polls to vote,” he said, adding, “You saw what happened in New York City. They’re allowing non-citizens to vote. That’s crazy to me.”

Morales told me that same thing in 2021 when I interviewed him — saying if elected he’ll require proof of citizenship to vote. To be honest, I thought maybe he was pandering at the time. But I’m now inclined to believe he means it as he has continued to say this in multiple interviews.

Morales is originally from Guatemala.

He came to Indiana with his family when he was a teenager, and graduated from Silver Creek High School in Sellersburg, in Clark County.

“I came here the right way, the legal way,” he said today on WIBC radio, on the “Kendall and Casey” show.

Morales has referred to himself as a former top adviser to Mike Pence, when Pence was governor, something the Associated Press appeared to doubt and decided to check out in 2018 when Morales announced he was running for Congress.

Former Pence chief of staff Jim Atterholt told the AP in an emailed statement:

“I considered [Morales] to be a senior adviser to both myself and to Governor Pence. Diego represented the Governor at countless events around the state and was critical to being our eyes and ears on how we could be of help to any and all Hoosiers.”

But back to citizenship and voting.

It’s incredibly interesting that this call for proof of citizenship to vote is coming from an immigrant with a thick accent.

But maybe it’s not.

Morales likes to tell people that he served in the U.S. Army “with a green card in his wallet” and unable to vote — and that as an American citizen now with full privileges, he considers that he is living the American dream.

Are non-citizens voting in Indiana?

We have no idea because no one is checking.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation has said that they believe non-citizens are voting in every state.

They have good reason to say this, and believe it.

In a 2016 study of just one state — Virginia — in just eight counties they found more than 1,000 non-citizens had recently been removed from voter rolls, and that they’d cast more than 200 ballots.

All of these were felonies, in all likelihood, but none were prosecuted.

In a follow-up report, the organization found a total of 5,500 non-citizens on voter rolls statewide, and that they had cast a total of 7,500 ballots going back to 1988!

They called their reports “Alien Invasion” and “Alien Invasion II” — but most of the people on the rolls weren’t illegal aliens: Most were legal residents (with work visas and other kinds of visas), and in most cases, they themselves had asked to be removed from voter rolls so as not to jeopardize their application for U.S. citizenship.

In most cases, they did not know that they were not legally able to vote.

As a quick test a few years ago, I asked friends on Facebook whether anyone knew a non-citizen who had voted. And sure enough, a friend in Palm Beach County, Florida, messaged me that she had a close friend or family member who had voted, though she is not a citizen. She didn’t know she was not supposed to, my friend said, as she’d lived in the United States for many years.

The problem is with voter registration and the so-called Motor Voter law of 1993, which required every Bureau of Motor Vehicles office to ask everyone to register to vote every time they got their driver’s license renewed, and required registration forms to be distributed many other places as well, including at schools.

Lots of hustling happened, and lots of non-citizens managed to get on the voter rolls nationwide.

I know of no state that is reviewing their voter rolls to try to find and remove non-citizens. Florida tried a few years back, but stopped after Leftists had a meltdown.

In a conversation last year with Beth Sheller, the elections administrator in Hamilton County, she assured me that the 2020 election was safe and secure. But when I asked how she would know if a non-citizen had voted, she said that she would have no way of knowing. She acknowledged that the voter registration system would probably not catch a non-citizen who has a driver’s license, and may even have a Social Security card (as the more than 600,000 illegal immigrants in the DACA program do).

In 2021, Sen. Erin Houchin, R-Salem, who is now running for Congress in Indiana’s 9th district, introduced a bill to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. It was co-authored by Sen. Eric Koch, R-Bedford.

The bill, SB 353, would have required people wanting to register to vote in Indiana to submit one of the following to prove they are American citizens:

• a birth certificate

• certificate of naturalization

• certificate of citizenship

• a Report of Birth Abroad of a U.S. Citizen, or

• an unexpired U.S. passport.

But that provision was stripped from the bill.

When I asked Houchin what had happened, she said the Secretary of State’s office had asked for it to be taken out, saying they didn’t think it was constitutional.

Attorney Jim Bopp, one of the top Republican election lawyers in the country, said that’s not true and that there is no legal problem with asking people to prove they are U.S. citizens to register to vote.

Sen. Erin Houchin introduced a bill in the Indiana General Assembly in 2021 to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. But the Secretary of State’s office complained and the provision was removed.

I reported all of this in a story for The Center Square, and the Secretary of State’s office sent me an email saying it was the DEMOCRATIC co-director of the Secretary of State Elections Division, Angie Nussmeyer, and the DEMOCRATIC co-counsel, Matt Kochevar, who called the Indiana Senate Republicans and asked them to take this out of the bill.

I left messages for Nussmeyer and Kochevar this week. They haven’t returned my calls.

I talked with a staffer for Senate elections committee chairman Sen. Jon Ford, R-Terre Haute, and the staffer came back and said Sen. Ford does not remember what happened with this bill, or who called him to ask for the proof-of-citizenship provision to be taken out. Ok.

When I was talking with her on Saturday after the Republican debate for the 9th congressional district race, Houchin reminded me that Connie Lawson was Secretary of State at the time.

Were Democrats running the Secretary of State’s Election Division under Connie Lawson?

Are they still?

Did Sen. Jon Ford insist that the proof-of-citizenship provision be taken out of Houchin’s bill at the behest of Democratic staffers? Or was it Lawson’s people, and they don’t want to disparage them by naming names?

Who knows.

But if Diego Morales is elected Secretary of State, it sounds like there will be a real opportunity to make sure that ONLY U.S. citizens are voting in Indiana elections going forward.

Here’s what else Morales said about election integrity on Bannon’s show:

“You know, we are at the verge of losing our country, and I believe protecting our liberty and freedoms starts at the ballot box, at the polls. In order to do that, we need to clean the voter rolls. We need to strengthen voter ID laws.”

And:

“We need to limit absentee ballots. We need to prevent ballot harvesting. And I believe I’m qualified to do that because I’ve been a poll worker, I’ve been an international election observer on presidential elections oversees. I’ve worked for the secretary of state’s office already. Been there, done that.”

The Republican nominee for Secretary of State will be chosen by delegates at the state Republican Party convention on June 18. Those delegates will be chosen by voters in the Republican primary on May 3.

There will be at least four Republican candidates vying for the nomination for Secretary of State:

• Paul Hager

• Diego Morales

• David Shelton

• Holli Sullivan

Paul Hager tells me he was the first to file, back in January.

David Shelton, the Knox County clerk, just entered the race at the end of March.

The only announced Democratic candidate is Destiny Scott Wells.

The Libertarian Party nominee is Jeff Maurer.

Additional info:

An excerpt from the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s 2017 report, entitled, “Alien Invasion II” —