The President Appears To Be Sending A Message To Illegal Immigrants That They Can Vote
The rule on voting from the LA Times' Joseph Tanfani:

The rule on voting eligibility is simple: Except for a handful of cities that permit noncitizens to vote in local elections, everyone who casts a vote in America is supposed to be a citizen, either by birth or by naturalization. And although the distinction is sometimes lost in the loud debates over undocumented immigration, even green-card holders, who are legal permanent residents, also are ineligible to vote until they become citizens.

In most places in the U.S., the question is handled solely on the honor system. When people register to vote, they check a box attesting that they are U.S. citizens. Election administrators verify identity by looking at driver's license or Social Security numbers, for example, but under federal guidelines, they may not ask for proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport.

Four states -- Arizona, Kansas, Georgia and Alabama -- have passed their own citizenship verification rules, but those requirements have been tangled up for years in lawsuits by progressive and voting rights groups, who argue that they present an unfair burden on minority voters. Thus far, they have prevailed, although the battles continue.

Georgia and Alabama haven't been enforcing their requirements, but in the other two states, the fights over proving citizenship have led to unusual results. Arizona now recognizes a second class of voters -- 6,328 for this election -- who can vote for federal offices, like president, but not for the governor or other state offices, because they haven't provided proof of citizenship.

This month, a federal appeals court forced Kansas to accept the registrations of people who had signed up to vote at motor vehicle offices, without providing proof of citizenship. Emergency notices were mailed to these voters, telling them in all capitals to "PLEASE DISREGARD" prior warnings that they weren't eligible to vote.

But nearly 9,000 others, because they signed up using Kansas' own form, still are considered ineligible to vote in this election by state officials unless they come up with citizenship proof by election day, Nov. 8. County election officials have scrambled to keep up.

Democrats must win four seats and the presidency to reclaim Senate control
Democrats must win four seats and the presidency to reclaim Senate control
"It is a mess, and that's the predicament that the judge ultimately put the election system in," said Desiree Taliaferro, spokeswoman for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who oversees elections. "It's crazy."

Another case on a similar issue is still pending in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Among the leaders of the conservative push for more citizenship checks is lawyer J. Christian Adams. While working at the civil rights section of the Department of Justice, he filed a voter intimidation case against two members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia; when the department refused to prosecute most charges, the case became a favorite example among conservatives.

Now president of the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation, Adams has pushed this year for measures to find and purge noncitizens from the voting rolls.

As one step, he's sought to show that it's too easy for noncitizens to register to vote. Eight Virginia counties provided records showing that more than 1,000 people had been removed from the rolls since 2011 because they were not citizens, the foundation said. In Philadelphia, a city that has been a focus of Trump's warnings of potential election fraud, 86 people were removed from the rolls after they turned out not to be citizens, and 40 of them voted at least once.

"These are only the people who are caught," Adams said. "It frightens me to think what the actual number is in Virginia. That's the problem here -- there's no verification after the box gets checked."

Here's President Obama:

video via @GatewayPundit