Could Non-Citizens Decide The Next Election?
Poli-Sci profs and researchers Jesse Richman and David Earnest write about their data in the WaPo:
Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data.In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, 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.
...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.
It doesn't matter if non-citizens votes change an election outcome or not - they are NOT citizens they should not be voting. period.
Charles at October 28, 2014 1:07 AM
Gee, this cannot happen. Those people who protested Bush winning Florida are now claiming voter fraud just doesn't happen. Who should know better?
Radwaste at October 28, 2014 2:05 AM
This is particularly infuriating to those of us who became citizens the hard way.
During the interregnum of being a lawful permanent resident, but not yet a citizen, I went several years without voting anywhere. Not here, because it would have been illegal and wrong and not in the country of my birth (though that would have been legal) because it just felt wrong to vote back there after I had moved here and effectively transferred my allegiance to the USA.
Incidentally, where's the enforcement? Falsely claiming US citizenship is a crime and, theoretically, the penalties include expulsion. As Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax said "... the hard way's hard, but it's not half so hard as the easy way".
the other rob at October 28, 2014 5:44 AM
"Incidentally, where's the enforcement?"
A source of (usually) mild amusement where I work is reading the MP's police blotter in the base newspaper. This week's edition notes someone who drove up to one of the gates last week and tried to get in, without any identification. The MPs ran some checks and found out he was an illegal. They called ICE, but ICE refused to do anything. With no other course of action available, the MPs escorted him back to the gate and turned him loose.
Cousin Dave at October 30, 2014 7:04 AM
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