Voting by Noncitizens
The Associated Press claims that “voting by noncitizens is extremely rare.”
IN FACT, scientific surveys of non-citizens in 2008, 2012, and 2022 combined with voter registration records found that about 10% to 27% of them were illegally registered to vote, and roughly half of these registrees voted. Moreover, numerous attempts to dispute these facts have all failed and suffer from 12 fatal flaws:
- They assert that the non-citizen voters in the surveys were actually citizens who mistakenly identified themselves as non-citizens, but in reality, this claim never had merit and was ultimately shattered by a verifying survey question that found “an error rate of 0.”
- They invoke the authority of “over 200 political scientists” who said that the survey results are unreliable, but in reality, their argument was based entirely on the discredited claim that citizen voters misidentified themselves as non-citizens.
- They allege that convictions for voter fraud are the only firm evidence on this issue, but in reality, convictions are a highly incomplete measure because the laws are frequently unenforced, and there are large loopholes to avoid them.
- They declare that the surveys don’t “constitute a representative sample” of non-citizens, but in reality, the evidence suggests they do.
- They employ mathematically illiterate arguments, like assuming that the main driver of survey statistical power is numerators, when in reality, it is denominators.
- They falsely refer to straightforward applications of survey data as “extrapolations” while regularly citing similar figures without tagging them with that misleading label.
- They downplay the academic credentials of scholars who conduct studies that find significant rates of illegal voter registration while ignoring the political donations of scholars who contest them.
- They invoke low numbers of cases of voter fraud in the Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database, but in reality, the Heritage Foundation explicitly states that the database is “not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all election fraud” but is merely a “sampling of recent proven” cases.
- They invoke the authority of “the conservative Cato Institute,” but in reality, Cato is a libertarian think tank that lobbies for open borders and has a history of understating illegal voting and other crimes committed by non-citizens.
- They purge hyperlinks when quoting key statements from research on this issue, thus misportraying thoroughly documented facts as unsupported assertions.
- They cite narrow, warped, and futile measures that understate the rate of non-citizen voter registration without disclosing the fallacies, assumptions, and limitations that underlie these measures.
- They fail to account for the reality that identity fraud is rampant among illegal immigrants, and California Senate Leader Kevin De Leon (D) publicly stated that “half of my family” could be deported if laws against identity fraud were enforced because “anyone who has family members who are undocumented knows that almost entirely everybody has secured some sort of false identification,” such as “a false Social Security card,” “a false driver’s license,” or “a false green card.”
Every illegal vote cast by a non-citizen nullifies the legal vote of a citizen, thereby subverting their Constitutional right to vote. Instead of reporting these facts or mitigating this threat to every citizen’s right to vote, major media outlets, “fact checkers,” certain scholars, and leading Democrats have denied that this problem exists.
