The executive director of the DC Board of Elections is concerned for the safety of her team after a barrage of threatening calls and email have besieged her office. “I am definitely nervous,” Monica Evans told the Washington Post. “The environment around elections has felt more unsafe.”
DC passed a law allowing non-citizens to vote in 2022, but this is the first election where they will be eligible, and conservatives are not happy. “Where the hell do you get off letting illegals vote? This is the nation’s capital. You are traitors, traitors to our country,” one voicemail said. The threats have gotten so bad, Evans has advised staffers to avoid wearing or covering up the Board’s name and logo on clothing when they’re in public. They’re not paranoid: at an early voting center in a Georgetown library, a vandal wrote “VOTING NOT A RIGHT. IS A PRIVILEGE OF CITIZEN.”
So far, more than 500 non-citizens have registered to vote in upcoming local elections. To be eligible, the registrant must be otherwise eligible except for the citizenship issue, and is not registered to vote in any other nation or jurisdiction.