ST. LOUIS – Union mailers have been sent to non-U.S. citizen migrant workers, saying, “Stop the Steal by stopping Trump’s allies. Vote for Harris-Walz and pro-worker candidates.”
A St. Louis area landscaping business alerted us that they’d received 11 of the mailers—addressed to their migrant workers, non-U.S. citizens. The business asked to remain anonymous.
The company’s manager told us their migrant worker employees, who are from Mexico, are all background checked and have legal H2B visas, which allow their temporary stay in the states. The manager explained the migrant workers are also allowed to have union representation – and that they pay dues to the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA) – but the manager cannot understand why the union would send mailers to non-U.S. citizens encouraging their vote in the presidential election.
We’ve tried repeatedly to get an explanation from Washington, D.C.-based union LiUNA, with three emails to their communications department and four phone calls.
We checked with Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who’s in charge of Missouri elections.
“I think it shows why we need a law in Missouri that requires voters to show proof of citizenship before they register and before they vote,” Ashcroft told us in a Zoom from his Jefferson City office.
“You can register online without any proof of citizenship. You can register without even and ID,” Ashcroft said. “Now, we have implemented in Missouri a requirement that no one is allowed to get a ballot, even if they’re registered, unless they have proven their identity at least once; so that is an extra check we have.”
If a non-U.S. citizen did vote, it’s a local election violation, as well as a federal offense.
“For somebody who did it accidentally who was trying to become a citizen, it would preclude them from becoming a U.S. citizen,” he said.
A study by the Brennan Center found 30 suspected cases of noncitizens voting in the 2016 election – which equates to .0001% of votes cast. A study by the Cato Institute found “noncitizens did not illegally vote in detectable numbers” in the 2020 election.
“There hasn’t been a lot of it as a percentage, but there shouldn’t be any of it,” Ashcroft said.
The Secretary of State’s Office will be watching, Ashcroft said, adding that some non-citizens have stepped forward on this matter.
“They’ve been automatically registered even when they didn’t want to be and I applaud those individuals for coming forward and saying, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa; I love America, but I want to follow the law,” he said.
Though the union did not respond to our report, the Missouri Democratic Party wrote FOX 2: “LiUNA is the international organization of construction craft laborers, with more than 500,000 members across the country. All unions routinely send information and mail to their members on various issues, and some of those issues may not apply to them.”
