By CHRIS POWELL
Maybe the illegal immigrant recently hailed as a martyr by Connecticut Democrats, West Hartford businessman Sead “Seyo” Cecunjanin, made an innocent mistake in 2018 when, in a transaction at the state Motor Vehicles Department, he applied to register to vote, falsely affirmed that he is a U.S. citizen, and was improperly added to the town’s voter rolls.
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Of course given Cecunjanin’s record — 29 years spent in the United States in violation of a final order of removal for having entered the country illegally on a false passport, plus a second illegal entry — he deserves no benefit of any doubt.
It is illegal for non-citizens to vote, and when West Hartford’s Republican Town Committee exposed Cecunjanin’s improper registration last week and news organizations inquired about it, Connecticut’s secretary of the state’s office resentfully looked into it. While confirming the improper registration, the secretary’s office emphasized that Cecunjanin had never actually voted. His illegal registration, the secretary’s office said, was an anomaly.
Maybe. But how does the secretary’s office or anyone know that it’s an anomaly — know that others among the estimated 125,000 illegal immigrants in Connecticut haven’t also registered to vote?
No one knows. Worse, no one in authority wants to know.
While it seems unlikely that many non-citizens have registered to vote, since it confers no financial benefit, Connecticut’s registration system invites fraud. Like so much else in state government, it’s never seriously audited. The system requires no proof of citizenship, just an affirmation no one ever checks — and it is widely known that no one ever checks.
Indeed, don’t expect action to be taken against Cecunjanin’s illegal registration, or, now that he has been released from federal custody and is back in West Hartford, expect him to return calls from journalists seeking explanations, though he has told one that he really didn’t register.
While Cecunjanin exploited a weak system, the bigger culprits are those who support it.
Start with the Democrats — members of Congress, state legislators, and a former Hartford mayor — who rallied at West Hartford Town Hall last month to protest Cecunjanin’s arrest by immigration authorities even before they had any idea why he had been arrested. They didn’t care. To Connecticut Democrats, any immigration arrest is wrong.
Then there is the state law engineered by Democrats authorizing special driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, nominally for public safety but actually to facilitate their breaking immigration law, a racket originating in New Haven in 2007 when city government started issuing city identification cards to illegal immigrants to help them pose as legal.
The issuance of driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants is responsible for the recent voter registration scandal in New Jersey, where more than 6,000 non-citizens registered and hundreds voted. It is being dismissed as a computer programming error but it’s not. It’s the same policy error Connecticut has made, registering voters without proof of citizenship.
Then there are the state laws forbidding police from cooperating with federal agents in apprehending immigration lawbreakers and purporting to ban agents from certain locations.
Facilitating illegal immigration and nullifying federal immigration law is state policy. Connecticut is a “sanctuary state.”
This policy is called humane but it devalues citizenship and inhumanely increases public expense, particularly with medical care for people who can’t legally work and education for children who don’t speak English and need years of instruction in two languages. No one in authority, especially not in New Haven, the center of the state’s open-borders movement, whose schools are falling apart, ever asks how much more bilingual education Connecticut can afford or how much worse the housing shortage should become. When the governor says he welcomes immigrants, he refuses to distinguish between legal and illegal.
President Trump is a demagogue on this issue but Connecticut’s nullifiers are demagogues too. In a Democratic scheme to transform the country’s political complexion, many millions of people have entered illegally in recent years while the law continues to presume that a simple affirmation of citizenship is adequate for voter registration. It’s not anymore.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 