A new study has found a disturbing fact for anyone interested in election integrity – non-citizens are voting in America’s elections and they could ultimately be the difference makers in close races.
Voter fraud is routinely dismissed as a myth by Democrats, something so insignificant that it doesn’t matter. Even after investigative journalist James O’Keefe recorded undercover video of poll workers offering Attorney General Eric Holder’s ballot to someone who wasn’t him, Holder and the Justice Department had no interest in the subject.
Republicans, by and large, support laws that would make the Holder ballot situation much less likely to happen. They support voter ID laws that would require people voting to prove they are who they say they are, to prevent people from voting on behalf of others.
Conversely, the right to vote, progressive activists like the Attorney General insist, is so sacrosanct that no measures can be taken to guarantee its integrity. Besides, they say any fraud that may occur is insignificant anyway.
But a new study by two professors tells a different story.
Jesse Richman and David Earnest, professors at Old Dominion University, conducted a study into how many, if any, non-citizens have voted in U.S. elections. It turns out there are enough to be difference makers in close races.
They write, “we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.”
Putting a finer point on it, the professors continue, “How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.”
It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in U.S. elections.
It is conceivable, they say, that the non-citizen vote could have been the difference in Democrats winning the filibuster proof 60-vote majority they enjoyed in 2009, resulting in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
“Non-citizens,” they found, “tended to favor Democrats [Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample], we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections.”
In Minnesota, the 2008 Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman was decided by 312 votes. Just .65 percent of Minnesota’s non-citizen population, barely 10 percent of the rate of non-citizens they found voted that year, pulled the lever for Franken, that could have been the difference.
They find similar possibilities in President Obama’s slim victory in North Carolina.
The issue of voter fraud, be it organized by political parties, people who simply aren’t legally allowed to vote, or some combination of both, is very real, according to this study. And it can make all the difference in the world.
Read Richman and Earnest’s article on their study here.