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The myth of the myth of the illegal voter — 39 Comments

1. We need somebody to do an authoritative and comprehensive comparison of voter registration and ID requirements across the world. Few people in Germany would believe that parts of the US allow same day registration and voting without an ID. Americans need to know how sloppy our laws are and push for reasonable fixes.

   I would add that the same approach could be applied to other things like abortion restrictions
   and gay marriage. American activists need to know that most countries don’t share their never-ending pushes for more “rights.” America probably has more victims than Syria, Iran, Venezuela and a few dozen other countries.

2. No ID is required to vote in the UK.

3. There is resistance on both sides to a nation-wide voter ID requirement: liberals because it might suppress the minority vote and conservatives because it smacks of a national database that they think of as Big Brother interference.

   Both sides need to get over it. I have seen mandatory voting in place in two countries, most recently in Kenya and Peru where I was posted during elections. National voter ID cards were in effect in both countries, and at least in Kenya purple ink was used to mark a voter’s finger after voting so s/he could not vote a second time.

   Given automated biometric capabilities these days, there is little reason to suppose we could not have a secure registration system instituted at the state level but probably with nation-wide commonality. Would minorities avoid registering? Probably no more than people of all races who currently refuse to register with the Social Security Administration, which is a pretty small number. Would some minorities be too stupid to register? If you believe this you’ve got a serious prejudice issue.

   Is this indeed a federal database? Not if done at the state level, like driver’s licensing, and the voter database is no more pernicious than the DMV database.

   It really is time for secure and universal voter registration requirement, to be instituted by the individual states. Some states would resist, but they would come around eventually as they see other states succeeding. I’m tired of having Kenyan and Peruvian friends laughing when I say we don’t have a voter ID requirement.

4. Unfortunately I can’t find the video, but in December Obama told a young woman interviewer who was admittedly an illegal that “if you vote you’re a citizen”. I had to listen a couple of times to make sure that I wasn’t hallucinating. I wish I was a Constitutional scholar.

5. I mentioned once before that my wife registered to vote in California without showing any ID whatsoever. Shortly after we moved into the state, we saw a guy sitting in front of Walmart with petitions to sign–he also had voter registration forms.

   I stopped to visit because he had on a Navy ball cap. My wife walked up, and mentioned that since she was not going to get a Ca Driver’s license she did not know how she would register. Bingo. We vote by mail; no one knows who actually fills out the ballot and mails it.

   How many people in California have had the same experience? Not a soul can answer that question.

6. London Trader; you have no voter ID; we have no Queen. Different cultures, different circumstances.

7. POTUS played the media and Dems perfectly. His US Attorneys in NY, NC, IL and CA will investigate. And it is an easy investigation. A few high profile convictions. Think tanks confirm millions of illegal voters. New laws enacted. New states in play.

8. I live in Virginia and there have been claims like this for years in the newspapers. Recently the governor, a democrat, ordered the board of elections not to cooperate with these investigations.

   A Virginia group organized to combat election fraud says a check of voter rolls in Maryland and Virginia shows 44,000 people are registered to vote in both states.

9. In regard to multiple registrations in different jurisdictions, the question is how to keep voter rolls up to date and ensure that a person votes one time only. For example, I moved not long ago and when I updated my driver’s license, I updated my voter registration. As far as I know, there’s no means to unregister yourself from your last registration – you have to assume that bureaucrats somewhere take care of that. This was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read “so and so is registered to vote in two states.” I have been too, and I’m betting that every person who was registered to vote, who ever moved to a new state and registered to vote there, has.

   Does anyone here know the process of how this information is communicated between states, counties or any other jurisdiction under which a person might be registered to vote?

10. Report: Russia Arrests Cybersecurity Official

    Lead Kaspersky Lab Investigator Also Arrested as Part of Treason Investigation

    Sergei Mikhailov, deputy chief at the FSB’s Information Security Center – known as the CDC – has been accused of receiving money from “foreign organizations,” Russian daily newspaper Kommersant reports, citing unnamed FSB sources. Mikhailov was reportedly arrested in December, and his friends have not been able to reach him since then, according to the report.

    The CDC, aka Military Unit (Vch) 6482, is responsible for monitoring the Russian internet as well as investigating data leaks, although some security experts say it may also be used for offensive operations.

    As part of the investigation, authorities also arrested Ruslan Stoyanov, who heads the computer incidents investigations team at Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, and who has reportedly also served as a liaison between the company and Russian security services.

    Citing unnamed sources, Kommersant reports that the investigation also centers on a private information security firm, which has not been named.

    there is always more..

11. “Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

    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.

    Because non-citizens 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. Non-citizen votes could have given 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. 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.”

    This is from a blog post on Hot Air in 2014, when this wasn’t controversial.

    http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/24/study-non-citizens-are-voting-in-federal-elections-and-probably-tipped-at-least-one-senate-race-to-democrats/

    ___________

    We know that voter fraud is occurring– is it at the 3-5 million number as suggested by President Trump?

    If their best guess in 2008 was that 6.4% of non-citizens voted, and there is an estimated 10 million illegals (the total of non-citizens would be higher, since this would include both legal and illegal non-citizens), it’s not out of the realm of possibility that 5 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election.

    One of the key components to this possible voter fraud is the motor voter law. And in California it’s very possible. Here is an article from 2015 about a new California motor voter bill that would automatically register anyone to vote that is “eligible” when they renew or get a drivers license.

    The federal motor voter form only requires that the person attest they are eligible– there is no other proof required. That’s why several states have sued to allow the form to require a proof of citizenship as part of the process.

    ________

    “The New Motor Voter Act automatically registers to vote all eligible voters when they obtain or renew their driver’s licenses at the Department of Motor Vehicles instead of requiring them to fill out a form. Those eligible may opt out of voter registration.

    “The goal is to ease barriers to voting, but election-integrity advocates warn that the measure could inadvertently add millions of illegal voters to the rolls given that California allows undocumented aliens to obtain driver’s licenses.
    Anti-fraud groups True the Vote and the Election Integrity Project of California had urged Mr. Brown, a Democrat, to veto the bill, saying it would lead to “‘state sanctioned’ voter fraud” and pointing out that the legislation exempts from penalties ineligible voters who wind up being registered.”

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/11/critics-predict-new-california-motor-voter-law-wil/

12. The real difficulty here is that we don’t have clear consensus and agreement about what defines a person as a citizen, and is thereby eligible to vote. There is a legal definition, but the legal definition is not being enforced. As noted above, even the former President intentionally muddied the definition of who could or should vote. The first step will be to define terms. This will be very difficult because so much is at stake.

    Trump is pulling a Roadrunner “beep, beep” on the Wile E. Coyote (Super Genius) main stream media. They go after the distracting noise and suddenly there is nothing there.

13. and we claim the GRU (military version of KGB now FSB) turned records over, but the news outlets refuse to point out both sides were hacked, but hillary is the idiot that arranged it all on a silver platter like a smorgasboard of evil.

    I am familiar with these two groups as part of my job:

    two hacking groups with alleged Russian ties: Fancy Bear, aka APT28, which is suspected of operating under the control of the GRU; and Cozy Bear, aka APT29, which is allegedly affiliated with the FSB

    though the funny part is that they are much more likely to have helped hillary and protect the same old same old going forwards (As china would want her too as she wont say crap about the islands they are taking from japan our ally, but trump did say something). Basically obama let the kudzu grow when he shouldnt have and everyone was too busy paying attention to the other things, now the stage is set for a bad conflict and economic horror depending on the actors actions or not actions…

    and if you think your experts in this stuff and discussion is easy, do note that in all the years i been bringing them up and their actions, avoidance was the rule or ignoring it..

    now that its timely, and in the press, and that, its ok to pretend to know whats been ignored for ages.

    remember Operation INFEKTION?
    Operation INFEKTION was a KGB disinformation campaign to spread information that the United States invented HIV/AIDS[2] as part of a biological weapons research project at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Soviet Union used it to undermine the United States’ credibility, foster anti-Americanism, isolate America abroad, and create tensions between host countries and the U.S. over the presence of American military bases (which were often portrayed as the cause of AIDS outbreaks in local populations).[3]

    According to U.S. State Department analysts, another reason the Soviet Union “promoted the AIDS disinformation may have been its attempt to distract international attention away from its own offensive biological warfare program, which [was monitored] for decades.” In addition to anthrax, the Soviets were believed to have developed tularemia, the plague, and cholera for biological warfare purposes, as well as botulinum toxin, enterotoxins, and mycotoxins.[4] An alternative explanation is that the operation may have been in retaliation for American accusations that the Soviets used chemical weapons in Southeast Asia, later dubbed the yellow rain incident

14. No ID is required to vote in the UK.

    The UK’s going to have a pilot test of voter IDs in 2018, though. See this article.

15. I was at a meeting in Beverly Hills City Hall last night, and the first thing the mayor said was that there had been “significant” voter fraud in Beverly Hills in the last election and that the city was going “all out to stop this interference in our democratic election system!”

    In Beverly Hills! I guess he didn’t get the memo about there being no voter fraud in the 2016 election.

    Of course there’s voter fraud! There’s always been voter fraud! In Philadelphia, where I come from, we used to say, “Vote early, and vote often.” We old farts can remember the 1960 election, when every time Republican votes would come in from downstate, another box of Democratic votes would be “found” in Chicago.
    (Richard J. Daley pere, when asked how he had managed to win elections all those years, replied, “Well, we count the votes.”

    That being said, the only time voter fraud is significant is when you have an upstate/downstate Rep/Dem dichotomy, such as in NY, PA , MI, IL, MN, OR, WI, and WA, and the vote is close. That eliminates NY, MN, IL, WA, and OR, at least this year, leaving you PA, WI, MN — i.e., “blue wall” states that Trump need to win. So naturally he’s concerned.

16. When I moved, I called the board of elections and submitted the change of address. No big deal.

    When my polling place was changed, I received a new voter id card and cards for the people who used to live in my home. I called the board of elections to get them removed – they refused since they didn’t know if they had moved within the state or out of state. So, I had to check the election registry every time I voted and eventually their names had a “check for address” note and then dropped off when they failed to vote within a certain period of time.

    I could have given the cards to friends to vote and the names would have remained as active voters. Even though we now have voter ID in the state, the free voter card is one of the accepted forms. To get off the rolls, you have to tell the board that you are moving to another state.

    I called one of my senator’s office and told them about this. They were interested in hearing and may use it as an example.

17. Another election rule in my state is that an absentee ballot has to be notarized. You fill out the ballot, put it in envelope #1 and seal it. Then take the envelope to a bank or tag agency and they will watch you sign and then put their stamp on it. No charge is allowed. Then, you put it in envelope #2 and mail it. It is a bit of work but worth it.

    When the state enacted the voter ID law, they limited the number of ballots one person could notarized. Once they reached the limit, then they had to go to the state to get another signature list. This was to prevent someone going into nursing homes and get everyone to “vote”.

18. Paul in Boston

    “In December Obama told a young woman interviewer who was admittedly an illegal that “if you vote you’re a citizen”…”

    No, that is not what he said. He was answering a two part convoluted statement and question. The interviewer said she knows people who are afraid to vote and she included millennials, Dreamers, undocumented citizens in the statement. But then in the second part she asks: “So if I vote, will immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?” Obama then answered THAT question because the first part was not actually a question. He also mentioned in his answer: “If you have a family member who maybe is undocumented, then you have an even greater reason to vote.”

    If you watch the interview you can tell what he is saying. He clearly is making a distinction between citizen and non citizen.

    http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-business-deceptively-edits-obama-interview-to-falsely-claim-he-told-illegal-immigrants-to-vote/

19. Re the “debunked claim” (that 3 million to 5 million immigrants living in the country illegally voted), where has that claim been debunked? To my knowledge it hasn’t been and probably can’t be. Nor do I believe that it can ever be affirmatively proven (or ‘bunked?’).

    This is a combination of Trump’s ego mixed with his uncanny ability to push his enemies’ buttons. And I would add to that the fact that “they” (HRC, the DNC, the Left and donks in general) started it all with the Russia-hacked-the-election! campaign and before that with the spurious recounts.

    As lawyers like to say, “they have opened this door” for him and have been holding it open so widely that he can’t resist taking full advantage of the opportunity (despite what his advisers are no doubt telling him).

20. Richard Saunders: In the state of Washington in 2004 we had an extraordinarily close gubernatorial race with the Republican winning by solid margins in virtually the entire state except for the Puget Sound area (especially King County where Seattle is) and after two recounts the (R) still led and then on the third recount the King County elections folks found several boxes behind a table or some such thing and lo and behold the (D) pulled ahead and that was it. This along with the Minnesota Senate race with Franken/Coleman are the two shadiest things I’ve ever seen and while they are not the kind of fraud Trump seems to be referring to they are examples of how easily elections can be tampered with especially in large metro areas.

    And these types of incidents greatly inflame the bitterness in many states that geographically are mostly red but get swamped by large metro areas that go blue by large margins. Leads to lots of anger in rural areas and things like Trump eventually happen.

21. Okay.

    Here is what Mediaite regards as “the full exchange.”

    RODRIGUEZ: Many of the millennials, Dreamers, undocumented citizens – and I call them citizens because they contribute to this country – are fearful of voting. So if I vote, will immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?

    OBAMA: Not true. And the reason is, first of all, when you vote, you are a citizen yourself. And there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating, etc. The sanctity of the vote is strictly confidential in terms of who you voted for. If you have a family member who maybe is undocumented, then you have an even greater reason to vote.

    Mediaite claims, immediately after the above quote, that “As you can see, Obama made it perfectly clear that he was talking about the rights of Latino citizens to vote, and clearly differentiated them from undocumented immigrants.”

    Oh? “Clearly”?? He certainly didn’t bother to contradict or correct the interviewer’s insistence that “I call them citizens because they contribute to this country.” It sounds to me like he was being intentionally imprecise.

    And here, for completeness, is a follow-up that Fox allegedly excised:

    OBAMA: People are discouraged from voting and part of what is important for Latino citizens is to make your voice heard, because you’re not just speaking for yourself. You’re speaking for family members, friends, classmates of yours in school…

    RODRIGUEZ: Your entire community.

    OBAMA: . . . who may not have a voice, who can’t legally vote. But they’re counting on you to make sure that you have the courage to make your voice heard.

    Mediaite helpfully chimes in, “Again, Obama is abundantly clear that he’s only talking about legal immigrants, and went out of his way to say that illegal immigrants cannot legally vote.”

    I can only say that their definition of “abundantly clear” and mine differ considerably.

22. MJR, thanks for the transcript. I took “will they come for my family and deport us” to be an admission that she’s illegal.

    I stand by my interpretation that he’s (a) encouraging her to vote illegally and (b) making the act of voting one that automagically makes her a citizen.

23. MJR – that’s interesting and one point to make is that if you are a “legal Immigrant”, you still can’t vote. However, if you are a American citizen, you can register to vote and then exercise that privilege.

    My mother was a legal immigrant. She voted after she became a citizen.

24. Do a search for the 2004 contest between Coleman and Franken in Minnesota and then try to convince me the recount was not rigged in Franken’s favor. It only took 312 ballots ‘found’ after eight months to put Franken in the US Senate. Voter fraud is real. In close contests it only takes a few hundred ballots to sway an election.

    Fraud is unlikely to have cost Trump the nation wide popular vote, but voter fraud is real.

25. parker, 6:29 pm —

    And then, Franken became the sixtieth Senate vote (out of sixty required) to pass the “Affordable Care Act” — you know, the one that Nancy Pelosi insisted we had to pass in order to see what was in it.

26. With the registration to vote having become trivialized, i.e. “motor voter”, and with the knowledge that the illegals are granted driver’s licenses (among many other things, like in-state college tuition for out-of-state-and-country illegals), it is preposterous to claim there is not and cannot be vote fraud.
    To my best recollection, I have never encountered an allegation or example of pro-Republican vote fraud. It is always the Democrats-Daley, LBJ in TX, Franken, etc. And as getting away with small crimes leads criminals to pursue greater crimes, letting Dems get away with modest fraud leads to greater fraud. Without doubt.

27. Does illegal voting make a difference? Yes, absolutely. I would assert that wherever the Democrat candidate wins by less than 1% of the vote, it was probably stolen. Al Franken in MN a few years back. Ami Bera vs Scott Jones in the 7th Congressional District here in California; THAT was a squeaker. And here in California, you’re GUARANTEED that at least 1% of the vote is illegal – and the State doesn’t WANT to do anything about it.

28. Ken Mitchell, 7:40 pm — “. . . and the State doesn’t WANT to do anything about it.”

    You kiddin’ me??? The State will find a way to prosecute YOU for voter suppression or somethin’.

29. The tears and anguish from the left seeking to thwart voter ID laws in the states tells me election fraud is real. I can find commonality with the left when it comes to state laws denying felons who have served their time and are off probation the right to vote. But the left never wants to meet the right in the middle. Its their way or the highway. Thus they get Trump and tears and anguish are multiplied a thousand fold.

30. Cornhead at 3:06.
    .
    Spot on. This unusual President will be bold, brash and unconcerned with courtesy. Other GOP pols over-try to appear pleasant and likeable – out of fear for how they may be reviewed in the dominant press. That fear makes them weaker, feeble, and hard to believe in. Trump defies the conventional narrative on having fewer votes nationwide and creates a controversy that he can’t prove and yet at the same time, he wins completely. The Left looks bad in this ongoing refusal to accept the results as legitimate, and will make it far worse as they claim that 1) every vote was by a lawful voter, and 2) a fairer election would be one that kept the voters in the dark on the many deceits lurking in the hacked email accounts.

31. You have two differing modes of fraud: retail voter fraud — and wholesale tabulation fraud — by Democrat machine operatives.

    One can be assured that wherever an urban Democrat machine exists, wholesale tabulation fraud is an art form.

    New Hampshire’s primary is a joke — because so many GOP voters are die-hard Boston Democrats with dual residencies.

32. But “a Democratic aide familiar with the exchange who spoke on condition of anonymity” seems a bit shaky for a source. -neo

    That seems like the understatement of the year.
    “familiar with the exchange” means “I wasn’t there” so this is third-hand hear-say at best.
    “conditions of anonymity” means “so no on can challenge my version” — with alternative facts, perhaps?

    However, regardless of the actual number of fraudulent votes Trump may have claimed, there almost certainly were some, per the comments above.

33. Illegal aliens can get drivers’ licenses in California. You can also register via the DMV in California. That seems a loophole to me, but according to Snopes, it is not a loophole. Not that Snopes has earned a reputation for objective truth-finding lately.

    Jesse Richman and David Earnest have published on noncitizen voting.

    The WaPo discusses it w many links.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/24/could-non-citizens-decide-the-november-election/?utm_term=.b55126437c0b

    Here is the paper: Do Noncitizens Vote in U.S. Elections?
    http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Do-Non-Citizens-Vote-in-US-Elections-Richman-et-al.pdf

34. Frog Says:
    January 26th, 2017 at 7:26 pm… And as getting away with small crimes leads criminals to pursue greater crimes, letting Dems get away with modest fraud leads to greater fraud. Without doubt.
    * * *
    Amen to that. (Applies to GOP and everyone else as well, but specifically to the Dems politically.)
    We have seen it prior to Obama, but it accelerated to rocket speed in the last 8 years.

35. “voter fraud” and voting irregularities, including fraud and incompetence, are real.

    Any article that talks about this without noting how many Michigan recount problems there were is being biased about the reality of the problem.

    Most Dem media avoid noting the recount failures in Michigan.

    Trump exaggerates. The Dem media like to call any exaggeration a “lie”, but without accurate proof, it’s not exactly a lie. (Only Trump & Rep exaggerations are treated this way, Dem lies are excused as exaggerations or ‘metaphors’).

    If the unknown truth turns out to be, after the investigation, between 200,000 and 600,000, would that make Trump a “liar”? No, it would mean his prediction model is inaccurate, and way off biased.

    Same as UN global warming models whose 2001 predictions are now, provably, below their lower bounds of changes (altho slow warming is occuring; about half as fast as the lowest bounds of the alarmist models).

36. Judicial Watch paper on voter fraud:

    https://structurecms-staging-psyclone.netdna-ssl.com/client_assets/jwemail/media/attachments/57d0/5b17/6970/2d5f/6a4b/0f00/57d05b1769702d5f6a4b0f00.pdf?1473272599

37. Here are the highlights of a study a few years ago:

    – First use of representative sample to measure non-citizen voting in USA.
    – Some non-citizens cast votes in U.S. elections despite legal bans.
    – Non-citizens favor Democratic candidates over Republican candidates.
    – Non-citizen voting likely changed 2008 outcomes including Electoral College votes and the composition of Congress.
    – Voter photo-identification rules have limited effect on non-citizen participation.

    And a quote from the abstract:

    “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. 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.”
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379414000973

    John fund had a recent column in the WSJ (11/30/16) citing several studies indicating that many non citizens (legally here and illegally) vote. One study concluded 13% and another about 15.5%. If we ignore the legal non citizens and just estimate illegals voting and there are 11 million here then the number of illegal votes cast was between 1.4 and 1.7 million. If there are more illegals here, say 30 million as a Goldman analysis concluded then the numbers are much higher – between 3.9 and 4.7 million.

    Those kinds of numbers are significant enough to merit the new DOJ investigating ways to ensure only citizens vote.

    And more importantly in the media war against Trump, these numbers make his claim sound not only reasonable but likely true that all of the difference in the national vote might be due to people voting who were not legally entitled to vote (legal and illegal non citizens).

38. The citizen vs non-citizen issue was, IMO, one of the major reasons Trump got elected.

    What’s done is done. But I’m counting on simple, clear and tight voter registration laws to be implemented.

    All the excuses of why many don’t want this are political BS, and I’m hoping Trump cuts right through it.

39. Tom G Says:
    January 27th, 2017 at 4:24 am

    The geologic record indicates that the Sun is not flat-line stable, that it goes through its own cycles of emission — that are millennia long.

    Consequently, the noise exceeds the signal. Nothing in recorded human history is solid enough to extrapolate from.

    1) Accurate figures have too short a baseline, 50-years, tops.

    2) Prior stats are w-a-a-a-y too sloppy.

    And even the accurate figures are ‘sloppy.’

    &&&&&

    Global warming has, in fact, occurred — going back 20,000 years.

    Since it began, the word population has exploded.

    So, yes, warming is a real problem… for non-humans.

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