The registrar of voters in the third most populous county in the United States is battling in court to keep non-citizens eligible to vote.  Ann Harris Bennet of Harris County, Texas (population: over 4.5 million) takes that astonishing position in filing with federal court.

Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times reports:

In a federal court filing last week she said people can be removed for other reasons, but there is no requirement she erase names of people even after they tell her they aren't citizens.

"Once a person is officially registered to vote, a state may only remove them from the voting list if: the person dies, changes residence, asks to be removed from the list, or becomes ineligible under state law because of criminal conviction or mental incapacity," Ms. Bennett said in court papers.  The National Voter Registration Act "does not create any obligation for a state to conduct a list maintenance program to remove the names of voters who may be ineligible due to lack of citizenship."

Ms. Bennett is fighting a request by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group pushing to clean up voter rolls, which asked the county to turn over records of people who'd signed up to vote then later admitted they weren't citizens.

If the state law of Texas does not require removing non-citizens from eligibility to vote, then the law needs serious change by the Texas state Legislature and the signature of Governor Abbott.

There is a perverse movement underway beyond just Texas to keep ineligible voters on the rolls:

She is one of what appears to be a trend of registrars arguing that groups looking to add more names to the voter rolls are protected by the NVRA, but those looking to trim bloated lists of old or erroneous names are not entitled to use the 1993 law to pry loose records.

Neal Kelley, the registrar in Orange County, California, made a similar argument in a response to the PILF last week, saying he would only turn over records "if the request is being made in furtherance of the purposes of the National Voter Registration Act which is to enhance voting opportunities for every American."

Mr. Kelley demanded PILF provide proof that it's trying to add more names to the voting rolls in order to get a look at the county's citizenship records.

In point of fact, every ineligible vote cast cancels the vote of a legal voter who voted the opposite way.  It is a clear and obvious subversion of democracy to keep ineligible people on the rolls.

But such is the fetishization of "voter participation" that a registrar would even dare make these claims.

We are losing our country when bogus votes are openly prized by public officials. responsible for election integrity.  And by the way, isn't this enabling vote fraud?  Does that make the registrars accomplices?