A while back, in A Voter-Fraud Friendly Environment, I documented the laughably lax voting requirements in my home state of California. Now we have a new report by Just Facts that concludes that “as many as 5.7 million noncitizens may have voted in the 2008 election“. The Washington Times reported on the study yesterday.
I don’t know if the headline number is correct – although the methodology looks sound. I am far more interested in showing that illegal voting took place on some sort of significant scale than I am in determining the actual number. You can examine the Just Facts findings I highlight later in this piece and decide for yourself.
But first, a quick summary of the California voting situation:
- No ID of any kind is required to actually vote at the ballot box
- Illegal immigrants are legally allowed and encouraged to obtain CA drivers licenses
- State officials chose not to make non-citizen license holders searchable in the DMV database
- Eligible holders of CA driver licenses are automatically registered to vote
- The California NVRA manual dictates a process of voter registration that makes it difficult not to be registered
The California National Voter Registration provides for the following process:
If the voter does not check either box regarding citizenship they are registered to vote and are entered into the voter rolls. The prospective voter is entered into the voter rolls under every circumstance except where the voter explicitly states they are not a U.S. Citizen – but the process does not end there. If the voter states they are not a U.S. Citizen, the prospective voter is then sent a follow-up contact inquiring about citizenship. If the individual responds affirmatively to the second inquiry – or if they do not check either box (“yes” or “no”) but do send the card back – even if they previously said “no” – they are then entered on the voting rolls as eligible to vote. The only way in which a prospective voter will not be registered is if they respond negatively on citizenship to the 2nd contact or if they do not respond to the 2nd contact at all.
The voting registration process in California has been purposefully – and systematically – constructed in a manner that enables and encourages illegal immigrants to vote.
President Trump won the election – 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227.
Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes – but her margin of victory in California was 4.3 million votes or 61.5% – dramatically exceeding the 53.5% margin in her other winning states.
In the popular vote outside of California, Trump won the rest of nation by 1.4 million votes – Trump received 58,474,401 votes to Clinton’s 57,064,530 votes.
Every time I hear the liberal line about there being no voter fraud or illegal voting, I shake my head. These people are either outright lying or willfully ignorant. The system put into place in California speaks for itself. Other states have been burdened with similar issues.
Eight states, along with the District of Columbia, have passed Automatic Voter Registration.
A PEW study found the following problems with our voter rolls:
- Approximately 24 million – one of every eight – voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate
- More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters
- Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state
The new analysis by Just Facts concludes that “as many as 5.7 million noncitizens may have voted in the 2008 election“. The Washington Times reported on the study yesterday. You can find the actual study here. You will need to wait about 5 seconds as it loads to the Electoral Issues section.
The study utilizes data from the 2008, 2010 and 2012 Harvard/YouGov Surveys along with a 2013 McLaughlin Survey. The headline number of 5.7 million comes from an analysis of the 2008 Harvard/YouGov study called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study:
In 2008, Harvard University’s Cooperative Congressional Election Study analyzed data from 32,800 adults polled by YouGov to assess their political views and activities.[989] The authors of a 2014 paper in the journal Electoral Studies weighted the data from self-declared non-citizens in this survey to make it representative of the non-citizen population in the United States.[990]
Just Facts found – through the Harvard study – that:
- 15% of non-citizens stated they were registered to vote.
- a database match with consumer and voter registration records showed that an additional 12% of non-citizens in the database were registered to vote, even though they said they were not registered.[991]
- 8% of self-declared non-citizens said “I definitely voted” in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
- 82% of the non-citizens who said “I definitely voted” stated that they voted for Barack Obama.
- a database match with consumer and voting records showed that an additional 8% of non-citizens in the database voted in this election, even though they said they had not voted.[1001]
Based on:
- the number of non-citizens in this poll,[1002] the margin of sampling error for their self-declared voting is ± 5 percentage points with at least 95% confidence.[1003] [1004] [1005]
- the number of non-citizens in this poll who were in the database,[1006] the margin of sampling error for their undeclared voting is ± 8 percentage points with at least 95% confidence.[1007][1008] [1009]
- these study results and Census Bureau population estimates, 2.8 million to 7.9 million non-citizens were registered to vote in 2008.[1000]
- these study results and Census Bureau population estimates, 594,000 to 5.7 million non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 election.[1010] [1011]
I am now going to digress slightly – but for good reason. An earlier December 15 2016, analysis by Just Facts examined a 2015 paper/critique done of the Harvard survey used above. It is most certainly what led Just Facts to engage in a deeper data examination – resulting in their new headline number of illegal voters.
As noted by Just Facts, “This 2015 paper was written by three scholars, two of whom are managers of the Harvard survey cited in the study, and the third a manager with YouGov. The central argument of their two-page paper is that all of the people in the [Harvard] survey who identified themselves as non-citizen voters either did not vote or were actually citizens.”
This 2015 paper was then used by the New York Times and the Washington Post – among others – to discredit any claims of illegal voting.
Interestingly, this all began earlier, after the Washington Post earlier ran an article on October 24, 2014 titled Could non-citizens decide the November election? This article was written by two professors at Old Dominion University using – data from the Harvard survey.
In the article, the professors conservatively estimated that “6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010” – or 2.8 million votes in 2008. This conclusion was hotly contested. So much so, the Post actually provided three rebuttal links, a response from the authors and a link to the 2015 critique analysis retroactively. It is the reason the 2015 critique analysis was written. The Post article is worth a read.
The Just Facts analysis is relevant because it found the much-cited 2015 critique of the Harvard survey used a variety of filtering methods that led to the removal of illegal voters in such a manner that there remained – exactly zero illegal voters. Hence no illegal voting. This is the same Harvard survey that led Just Facts to arrive at an estimated range of 594,000 to 5.7 million illegal votes. And the ODU professors to estimate 2.8 million illegal votes in the same period.
Lies, damn lies – and statistics…
In their analysis, Just Facts cite some glaring issues with the 2015 critique of the Harvard survey. I quote:
- instead of examining the 2008 presidential election, the critics focus on the 2010 mid-term election when the presidency was not at stake, and turnout was lower. In 2010, 489 people identified themselves as non-citizens in the survey, and 13 of them said they voted or were recorded in the Catalist database as voting. This cuts the number of voters from 38 to 13.
- then they dismiss anyone who did not also take part in the 2012 survey, which narrows the pool of non-citizens from 489 to 105, or by 79%.
- then they dismiss anyone who did not say they are non-citizens in both 2010 and 2012. This further narrows the pool of non-citizens from 105 to 85, leaving only 6 voters.
- then they dismiss anyone who did not appear in the Catalist database as voting, which cuts the number of voters in 2010 from 6 to 0.
They also analyze the 2012 presidential election, and their methods are even more problematic. In this case, 695 people identified themselves as non-citizens in the survey, and 61 of them said they voted or were recorded in the Catalist database as voting. Yet:
- they dismiss anyone who did not also take part in the 2010 survey, which narrows the field of non-citizens from 695 to 105, or by 85%.
- then they dismiss anyone who did not say they are non-citizens in both 2010 and 2012. This reduces the number of non-citizens from 105 to 85. Note that the survey only asked 15 of these non-citizens if they voted in 2012, and 10 of them said they did.
- then they dismiss all 10 of these people, because they do not appear in the Catalist database as voting. Moreover, they do this while failing to reveal that all of these people specifically identified their choice for president—nine for Obama and one for Romney.
- then, buried in a footnote, they mention that one person who identified herself as a non-citizen in both the 2010 and 2012 surveys was matched by Catalist as voting in 2012. They say that this “appears to be the result of a false positive match with Catalist,” because the person “stated in both the 2010 and 2012 survey that she was not registered to vote.” This argument is based on the unspoken assumption that non-citizens would never lie about voting, even though such an admission could expose them to criminal penalties.
Just Facts rightly noted the following facts likely contributed to an even higher turnout of illegal voters in the 2016 election:
- Trump campaigned on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration, and this may have driven non-citizens to vote against him.
- The number of adult non-citizens in the U.S. recorded by the Census Bureau has risen from 19.4 million in 2008 to 21.0 million in 2016.
- Shortly before the election, Obama publicly stated that election records are not cross-checked against immigration databases and “there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating, et cetera.” This let non-citizens know that they stand little chance of being caught if they vote.
- In 2016, the Obama administration supported a court injunction to prevent Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia from requiring people to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.
Data can be interpreted in a variety of fashions and I am sure there will be a strong rebuttal of the new Just Facts analysis shortly. Just as there was for the Old Dominion professors.
But the underlying Harvard survey remains.
As I stated earlier, I don’t know how many illegal votes occurred in either the 2008 or the 2016 election. But I am sure there were many. The voting system has been set up by Democrats for this very purpose.
It’s time for some voter I.D. laws in this country. Illegal voting is, quite simply, a fact.
Give this video from November 4 2016, a quick watch. At 3:22 you can watch Obama directly and explicitly encourage non-citizens to vote in the election.
newer post 13 Demands for Qatar
older post The Beauty of Negative Rights