Could Non-Citizens Decide Mid-Terms?

25 Oct, 2014 by William Teach

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I told you the other day about North Carolina finding hundreds of non-citizens on the voter rolls, mostly those who are illegals with DACA status. A full audit was done, and the results…

(WRAL) The NC Board of Elections completed an audit Friday of more than 10,000 voters whose citizenship status had been questioned by a so-called voter watchdog group.

According to a news release, the agency analyzed data provided by the NC Division of Motor Vehicles and the US Department of Homeland Security to flag 1,425 registers voters who are likely non-citizens.

“We are working to ensure that no ballot cast by a non-citizen will count in this or any future election,” said Executive Director Kim Westbrook Strach.

Guidelines are being implemented to challenge improper ballots by non-citizens. And, to be clear, the audit found that it was not hundreds of DACA illegals, but, 109. Let’s also not forget that Democrats shrieked about voter fraud after the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections. They also trotted out the meme to a small degree when they lost the House in 2010. One uber-Conservative neo-con newspaper is overly-hysterical about the potential for voter fraud by non-citizens

Could non-citizens decide the November election?

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.

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.

Patterico notes that this should be on the front page of every newspaper. But, it won’t. Heck, there is no footer at the Washington Post article denoting that it is even in a print edition. Patterico goes on

The progressive think tank Center for American Progress puts the number of noncitizens in the U.S. at 22.1 million in 2012. Of these, “13.3 million were legal permanent residents, 11.3 million were unauthorized migrants, and 1.9 million were on temporary visas.” These numbers are roughly consistent with numbers offered by the Department of Homeland Security (.pdf) and Kaiser Health News. So let’s take 22 million as our number of noncitizens.

Richman and Earnest estimate that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008. 6.4% of 22 million is 1,408,000.

That’s 1.4 million illegal votes likely cast in the presidential election of 2008.

Richman and Earnest also estimate that 2.2% of noncitizens voted in 2010. (In off-year elections, such as 2010 and the approaching election in 2014, turnout is obviously lower.) 2.2% of 22 million is 484,000. That’s nearly half a million illegal votes likely cast in the election of 2010 (and the same number could be cast in the upcoming election).

Getting past any notion of whether non-citizens voting, particularly illegal aliens, helps Democrats more than Republicans (it does), what this does is significantly harm our institution of voting. Democrats have called the Right To Vote “sacred”, lately due to having to *gasp* show an ID in order to say “hey, I’m me!” They complain about citizens being disenfranchised (again, lately due to voter ID requirements, without mentioning voter ID requirements in states that heavily vote D, such as Hawaii). Well, every single vote cast by a non-citizen means that a vote by a legal US citizen is cast aside.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.