Matthew Vadum is an award-winning investigative reporter and the author of the book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."
And if illegal voting by non-citizens, who tend to support Democratic Party candidates and who heavily supported President Obama, could tip the scales in the 2008 congressional elections, it can do so again in congressional elections next week and in the presidential contest in 2016. In 2008 one report estimated that as many as 2.7 million non-citizens were registered to vote nationwide.
The academic report, to be published in the December issue of Electoral Studies , continues the ongoing demolition of the Left’s narrative that voter fraud is a figment of paranoid Republicans’ imagination. Democrats cling religiously to their mantra that voter fraud doesn’t exist or is of little consequence because they have difficulty competing electorally without vote fraud. Fraud helps Democrats eke out victories in close races, which helps to explain their vehement opposition to commonsense electoral integrity measures like purging dead people from voter rolls or requiring photo ID for voting.
The findings of Jesse Richman and David Earnest, two political science professors at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., confirm that voter fraud is commonplace and widespread, something that honest, as opposed to engaged or left-wing, scholars have known for years.
“In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections,” the authors write.
The academics got their data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) which contains what they term a “large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) [that] provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010.” Using CCES data from 2008, they tried “to match respondents to voter files so … [they] could verify whether they actually voted.”
Although non-citizen participation “is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration,” they write. This new study “examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants,” a first in voting studies, they claim.
The authors found that non-citizens favor Democratic candidates over Republican candidates and that non-citizen voting probably changed 2008 outcomes including Electoral College votes and the partisan makeup of Congress.
“We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections,” according to Richman and Earnest.
“Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress,” the authors write.
In other words, non-citizen voters likely started America down the path to ruin by providing critical votes in Congress to promote President Obama’s catastrophic policy agenda.
Although “[m]ost non-citizens do not register, let alone vote … enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races,” Richman and Earnest wrote in a recent oped in the Washington Post .
North of 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples reported being registered to vote. “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,” they write.
Non-citizens favored Democrats in 2008 and Obama won upward of 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample. The authors write:
“[W]e find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections … Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.”
The authors’ paper is consistent with other credible reports of non-citizen voting. For example, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) unveiled a study in 2011 showing that almost 5,000 illegal aliens cast votes in the U.S. Senate election in that state in 2010.
Non-citizen voting, for better or worse, has been part of the American experience for a long time.
In the late 1700s and first half of the 1800s various states allowed non-citizens to vote. In some states individuals who intended to become U.S. citizens were allowed to vote but historically the alien suffrage movement has failed to get much of a foothold. By the mid and late 1800s states had largely outlawed voting by non-citizens. It has long been a crime for non-citizens to vote in national elections.
Non-citizens are allowed to vote in some elections in a handful of jurisdictions across the country. For example, Takoma Park, Md., a Washington, D.C. suburb burdened with an aging hippy population, has allowed non-citizens –including illegal aliens– to vote in local elections since 1992. But similar enclaves of Sixties radicals permitting non-citizen voting tend to have small populations and are few and far between.
Some left-wingers say that election fraud is justifiable because in a sense it compensates the poor for having little political power. Radical activists laid the foundation for illegal voting by non-citizens at the beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
Marxist academics and activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were the architects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 which opened the door to an explosion of voter fraud across America. The NVRA, also called the Motor-Voter law, forces states to register to vote anyone applying to renew a driver’s license or obtain welfare or unemployment compensation benefits. State employees are now forbidden by law from asking would-be registrants for proof of U.S. citizenship.
The NVRA also compelled states to allow mail-in voter registration, which made it easy for left-wing activists to enter false names on the voter rolls without any kind of contact with a government official. States were also under orders not to purge important Democratic constituencies such as the dead and criminals from voter rolls for a minimum of eight years.
It is unclear how much fraud takes place as a result of mail-in voting. Such fraud, which takes place during the registration stage and the voting stage, has barely been examined by scholars.
But the Motor-Voter law, notes journalist John Fund, has “fueled an explosion of phantom voters.”
And that’s exactly what it was intended to do.
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