How Blue State Election Official Responds to DACA Recipient Proclaiming, ‘We Are Voting’

After a self-identified noncitizen told the Minnesota state legislators, “We are voting,” the state’s top election official insisted that noncitizen voting isn’t a problem.

“Our office has no indication that noncitizen voting is a problem in Minnesota or nationally,” Cassondra Knudson, deputy communications director for Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, told The Daily Signal in an email Monday.

Simon, a Democrat, asked the Minnesota Legislature to pass bills this year to provide for automatic voter registration, to restore voting rights to felons, and to preregister 16- and 17-year-olds to vote.

“Between 2018 and 2021, only 62 adults were convicted of voting-related crimes in Minnesota, including voting while ineligible, registering while ineligible, or registering with the intent to vote in more than one precinct, according to the Minnesota judicial branch,” Knudson told The Daily Signal.

She noted that the state has 3.5 million registered voters.

At a Jan. 10 hearing held by the Minnesota House Transportation Finance and Policy Committee, a young woman named Angelico Bello was among numerous speakers on a bill to grant state driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.


“I’m a proud product of my mom. I’m also a DACA recipient,” Bello told the committee, referring to the federal program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. “As a DACA recipient, it has also been hard to have family members without a driver’s license.”

President Barack Obama issued the rule creating Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2012 to shield from deportation those brought unlawfully to the U.S. as children.

Bello went on to issue a warning to the Minnesota lawmakers during the hearing.

“Know that you are all in these chairs because of us. We are voting. Our people are voting,” Bello said. “If you don’t pass this bill, people are going to vote you all out.”

Bello also said members of her generation will take the seats of the legislators.

“Pass this bill now. Because our community is going to keep fighting and we are not going to leave,” Bello said, adding:

We are going to stay here. We are going to continue to stay here. Little do you all know that we are the generation that is coming that is going to be taking up your seats. So please be of service, or else we are going to come take your seats as well.

The Daily Signal followed up with Knudson, the spokesperson for Minnesota’s secretary of state, asking whether Bello is registered to vote in the state.

“There is a law regarding accessing voter registration information in Minnesota,” Kundson said in an email. “Part of this law requires information only be provided to Minnesota residents. Another part requires the information only be used for political, elections, or law enforcement purposes.”

Minnesota state Rep. Walter Hudson, a Republican, said Bello’s testimony was talked about in the halls of the state Capitol. Hudson asserted that noncitizen voting is a problem in Minnesota.

“She’s saying the quiet part out loud,” Hudson told The Daily Signal of Bello. “Noncitizens voting has definitely been a known issue. As much as the Democrats and secretary of state, the governing majority here, pooh-pooh and downplay it, we know that our election system is extraordinarily vulnerable to...




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