Study uncovers evidence of widespread registration among ineligible voters
By Margaret Menge; LifeZette:
A new study of immigration in the U.S. found that up to 5.7 million non-citizens may have voted in the 2008 presidential election and as many as 3.6 million in the 2012 election.
The study was published last week by a nonprofit institute called Just Facts, based in New Jersey. Researcher James Agresti examined a number of polls, including one done by McLaughlin & Associates in 2013, and three studies by Harvard University researchers analyzing YouGov surveys.
In the 2008 YouGov survey of 32,800 adults, 15 percent who said they were non-citizens also said that they were registered to vote. An additional 12 percent of non-citizens who participated in the survey were found to be registered to vote, even though they had said they were not.
In this same survey, 8 percent of the non-citizens said “I definitely voted” in the 2008 presidential election.
Using U.S. census data and accounting for the margin of error, Agresti estimates that between 594,000 and 5.7 million non-citizens could have voted illegally in the 2008 election, when Barack Obama was first elected president.
In the 2012 YouGov survey, 14 percent of those who said they were non-citizens also said they were registered to vote, and 9 percent said they had voted in the 2012 election.
Extrapolating from this, Agresti estimates that between 1.2 million and 5.6 million non-citizens voted in 2012, when Obama defeated Republican nominee Mitt Romney to win election to a second term.
Agresti used a number of calculations to arrive at the numbers he believes to have a 95 percent confidence level. He used official numbers of non-citizens in the U.S. from the U.S. Census Bureau, which, it should be noted, counts only non-citizens who respond to census surveys.
His calculations, if true, indicate a massive problem with the integrity of elections in the U.S., and call into question the results of several close elections, including the 2016 North Carolina governor’s race, in which the Republican incumbent governor, Pat McCrory, was defeated by 10,263 votes. In 2008, when more than five million non-citizens may have voted nationwide, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) was elected to the Senate after a recount that began with a 215-vote lead for this opponent, Norm Coleman. At the conclusion of the recount, Franken was declared the winner by a margin of 225 votes. His election gave the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate for part of 2009.
Hispanics, who account for 76 percent of illegal immigrants, according to the Pew Research Center, vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. In the 2016 presidential election, it was 2-to-1, with 28 percent of Hispanics voting for Donald Trump, while 65 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.
When non-citizens are voting illegally, the votes of Americans get canceled out, Agresti pointed out in a conversation with LifeZette.
“If they’re voting against you, they’re effectively stealing your vote,” he said.
But is it really possible so many illegal immigrants could be registered to vote? And that they could be voting?
A Hispanic woman in South Florida told LifeZette this week that she knows non-citizens who voted in the last election.
“They said they thought they could register since they had a DL #,” she said in a text message, with “DL #” referring to a driver’s license number.
Every state issues driver’s licenses to non-citizens, which can then be used as a picture ID to establish a person’s identity. But it is a crime for a non-citizen to vote.
A non-citizen convicted of voting illegally can be fined, sentenced to up to a year in prison, and deported.
The 1993 “Motor Voter” law required states to make voter registration available to people applying for or renewing a driver’s license, and also required states to accept registrations by mail on a postcard-sized federal form.
A Social Security number is requested but not required in order to register to vote in most states, and a person can often register without providing either a Social Security number or a driver’s license number, and then vote by absentee ballot without providing any identification at any point.
In 2012, Florida’s secretary of state, Ken Detzner, asked county election supervisors to send letters to 180,000 people who were on the voter rolls in Florida but had shown up, in a cross-check against the driver’s license database, as being non-citizens. Supervisors of election objected, as did the American Civil Liberties Union, claiming eligible voters could be disenfranchised, even though Detzner was simply asking them to send out letters requesting proof of citizenship. The list was whittled down, but the hue and cry did not abate. Eventually, Detzner pulled the request, promising to revisit the issue when more accurate data could be obtained.
“Democrats have always tried to downplay election fraud of various kinds because it usually benefits them,” says Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. “The people who shouldn’t be voting are overwhelmingly voting for Democrats.”
After the 2016 presidential election — in which Donald Trump won the electoral college, and thus the election, but Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes — Clinton said that she would join recounts in several states that Trump had won. Trump responded by tweeting: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
If Agresti’s numbers are right, and if millions of non-citizens are voting illegally in U.S. presidential elections, it’s possible that Trump is right.
In early February, President Trump announced he was appointing Vice President Mike Pence to lead a commission to investigate voter-registration issues, including fraud.
Voting by non-citizens, said Krikorian, is “one of the things they’re going to look at.”
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