The media mocked and jeered President-elect Donald Trump when he claimed last year that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for millions of illegal immigrants who voted in California. And while Trump has not been able to prove his claim, a new study provides evidence that supports it. It’s still far beyond a certainty that illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton in any significant numbers, but the study shows that in the prior two presidential elections, the window of opportunity was certainly open.
According to work done by researcher James Agresti of the nonprofit Just Facts, as many as 5.7 million non-citizens may have voted in the 2008 presidential election and as many as 3.6 million may have cast ballots in the 2012 contest. Agresti came to his conclusions through an analysis of several polls throughout the years and previous studies performed by Harvard University.
From PoliZette:
In the 2008 YouGov survey of 32,800 adults, 15 percent who said they were non-citizens also said that they were registered to vote. An additional 12 percent of non-citizens who participated in the survey were found to be registered to vote, even though they had said they were not.
In this same survey, 8 percent of the non-citizens said “I definitely voted” in the 2008 presidential election.
Using U.S. census data and accounting for the margin of error, Agresti estimates that between 594,000 and 5.7 million non-citizens could have voted illegally in the 2008 election, when Barack Obama was first elected president.
In the 2012 YouGov survey, 14 percent of those who said they were non-citizens also said they were registered to vote, and 9 percent said they had voted in the 2012 election.
Extrapolating from this, Agresti estimates that between 1.2 million and 5.6 million non-citizens voted in 2012, when Obama defeated Republican nominee Mitt Romney to win election to a second term.
Does this mean that several close elections over the last decade have produced invalid results? On that, Agresti cannot come to a conclusion, but there’s no doubt that the integrity of our voting systems is in serious question. Now is the time when we need to be focused more heavily than ever on making sure that each and every voter IS who they SAY they are, that they are properly registered, and that they are citizens and therefore eligible to cast a ballot. And unfortunately – but not surprisingly – Democrats are fighting every initiative out there to shore up this kind of security using the more spurious, dishonest arguments they can find lying around.
We the people deserve to know that our election results are valid, and we are entitled to use any reasonable means necessary to secure that knowledge. Anyone who fights us has an ulterior motive, and that means they are no friend to true democracy.
