New evidence that voter fraud is real

Published 7:07 pm Tuesday, October 28, 2014

1. Nearly 9 in 10 doubt Obama, GOP can break gridlock
2. Federal ruling on North Carolina voting laws bolsters voter ID laws in Texas and other states

Though the Washington Post has editorialized against Voter ID laws as being a solution in search of a problem, two political science professors have provided proof — in the Post’s own pages — that voting by illegal immigrants and other non-citizens is common, and in some cases could sway elections.

“Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens?” ask professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest of Old Dominion University. “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.”

But there is data — particularly, in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which looked at voting data in 2008 and 2010.

“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,” Richman and Earnest said. “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.”

These numbers have real-world consequences.

“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,” Richman and Earnest said. “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.”

Bear in mind, again, that it’s the Washington Post reporting this.

That newspaper believes there’s a move afoot — a vast, right-wing conspiracy, to coin a phrase — to disenfranchise legitimate voters.

“Responsible politicians should be doing all they can to encourage people to exercise their most precious of rights,” the Post opined last week. “Instead, Republican leaders in states around the country are continuing their war even on what should be uncontroversial, small-scale reforms, in a transparent attempt to depress turnout among poor and minority — that is, Democratic — voters.”

In fact, the Post claims, there’s no voter fraud problem at all.

“The United States does not have a voter impersonation crisis demanding the imposition of voter ID requirements, which, as the Government Accountability Office found last week, tend to depress turnout,” it said. “Republicans’ blatant efforts to depress turnout even more is a disgrace.”

But the facts say otherwise. Richman and Earnest have presented an unbiased look at the statistical reality of voter fraud.

“Our research cannot answer whether the United States should move to legalize some electoral participation by non-citizens as many other countries do … or find policies that more effectively restrict it,” they said. “But this research should move that debate a step closer to a common set of facts.”

And so it should.