Non-Citizens Impacting Elections
Reuters claims that its discovery of “more than 30,000 self-declared non-citizens” on U.S. “voter rolls” is “too small” to “impact elections.”
IN FACT, presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections have been decided by tiny fractions of that figure, and the greater threat to election integrity isn’t “self-declared non-citizens” but non-declared ones. Here are the specifics:
- After reporting in July that only a “small number” of non-citizens are illegally registered to vote, Reuters is now reporting that its review of “official records” has found that “US states may have added more than 30,000 self-declared non-citizens to the nation’s voter rolls since 2000 because of software glitches and clerical errors made while processing their driver’s license and state ID applications.”
- Nevertheless, Reuters alleges that “experts” say such numbers “were too small relative to the country’s more than 170 million registered voters to impact elections.”
- Belying that assertion, Republican George W. Bush beat Democrat Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election by winning the electoral votes of Florida by a margin of 537 votes.
- Closer than that, Democrat Al Franken beat Republican Norm Coleman by a margin of 312 votes in 2008 to be a U.S. senator from Minnesota, which gave Democrats the “pivotal” Senate seat they used to pass Obamacare.
- Even closer, Democrat Christine Gregoire beat Republican Dino Rossi in 2004 by a margin of 129 votes to be the governor of Washington State.
- Closest of all, Republican Marianette Miller-Meeks beat Democrat Rita Hart by 6 votes in 2020 to be the U.S. representative for Iowa’s second Congressional district.
- Legal self-declared non-citizens can easily be found in voter databases because they use their real identities, while illegal non-citizens cannot be easily found because they routinely use fraudulent identities.
- Legal self-declared non-citizens tend to be law-abiding because they must pass a criminal background check in order to immigrate and have a strong disincentive not to vote because they can lose their legal status by doing so.
- In contrast, illegal non-citizens all break the law by illegally entering the U.S. or overstaying their visa, are already deportable by virtue of those offenses, and have strong incentives to vote because Republicans want to deport them, while Democrats want to give them welfare and amnesty.
- Thus, 82% of non-citizens who admitted to voting in the 2008 presidential election stated that they voted for Democrat Barack Obama, while only 18% said they voted for Republican John McCain.
- Based on a survey of non-citizens combined with voter registration records, a comprehensive study conducted by Just Facts in 2024 estimated that 2–5 million non-citizens are illegally registered to vote.
- Attempts to refute Just Facts’ study by organizations like NPR, the BBC, the New York Times, Snopes, the Cato Institute, NewsGuard, the Center for an Informed Public, and the Brennan Center for Justice all failed to produce a single legitimate objection to it and resorted to using debunked arguments that suffer from 12 fatal flaws.
- Regardless, even Reuters’ narrow study reveals enough illegally registered non-citizens to overturn important election results.
