Voter-fraud fear exploit

Republicans are creating irrational outrage over Washington DC's policy of allowing non-citizen residents to vote in local elections.

The outrage is irrational because those targeted for outrage mostly don't live there and therefore are not affected by the practice.

Many places in Europe allow non-citizen residents of a city to vote in local elections. The idea shocked me at first, but on further thought I concluded it made sense. Non-citizen residents have the same relationship to the city that citizen residents have: they benefit from local services and support them with taxes.

Republicans would have us conflate the act of lawfully voting as a non-citizen, when and where that is authorized, with the act of voting fraudulently. But the two are completely different. The latter is extremely unlikely, because what one can personally gain by voting is not enough to motivate people to break a law. In fact, individual voter fraud is very rare.