Darwin Jonathan Rivera Flores is 30 years old, a Honduran national living in Winnetka, California. He is not a U.S. citizen. He is also, according to federal prosecutors, a registered California voter who falsely claimed to be an American citizen to obtain that registration.
He was arrested Friday morning on two felony charges. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced it himself, with the kind of directness that the Biden DOJ almost never applied to election integrity cases: “Because states like California allow non-citizens to easily register to vote and receive a ballot by mail, there is no telling how many non-citizens are currently registered.”
Read that last sentence carefully. The man enforcing federal election law in California is saying out loud that he doesn’t know how many illegal registrations exist in the state — because California’s automatic voter registration systems, its refusal to participate in federal voter roll verification, and its blanket sanctuary posture have made the scope of the problem impossible to determine from the outside.
This is the point conservatives have been making for years while Democrats called it a conspiracy theory. The system doesn’t just make noncitizen voting possible. As Essayli put it, it allows it to happen “easily.” You don’t need to be clever. You don’t need to scheme. You just need to live in California, interact with a government system that automatically registers you, and not actively correct the error.
Rivera Flores faces federal charges. He is presumably one of the cases the 1,000 DOJ election monitors deploying for November are supposed to deter and catch. And his arrest lands in the same week that Virginia found 6,531 admitted noncitizens on its voter rolls, that Alaska sent verification letters to 3,000 suspicious registrations, and that the DOJ’s earlier press release documented a pattern of noncitizen voter fraud cases stretching across multiple states.
California has aggressively resisted federal efforts to examine its voter rolls. The state’s attorney general is in court fighting the USPS mail ballot tracking requirement. Governor Newsom signed a law this month named after the journalist most actively exposing the state’s fraud problems. And the state has automatic motor voter registration that — as the New Jersey case confirmed — can place noncitizens on the rolls without any meaningful verification.
The SAVE America Act would require proof of citizenship to register. It passed the House. The Senate is on recess. An Obama-appointed judge in Boston has now blocked the mail ballot verification order twice. And California’s first assistant U.S. attorney is out there saying he has no idea how many illegal registrations exist in the state he’s supposed to be protecting.
Sixty-five days to November. The voters who are being replaced by fraudulent registrations are running out of time to stop it. Pass the SAVE America Act. When Congress comes back September 8, make it the first vote.
