Non-citizen voters gave Obama the edge in 2008 and 2012 — and will in 2014 if we don’t do something about it

Posted on October 27, 2014 by Dr. Eowyn |

I read this article 2 days ago, but found it so depressing that I can bring myself to post it only today.

In an article for The Washington Post on October 24, 2014, “Could Non-Citizens Decide the November Election?,” political scientists Jesse Richman and David Earnest report on their stunning research finding that non-U.S. citizens had voted in both the 2008 and 2010 elections, and they did so in sufficient numbers that they likely changed the outcome, that is, the election and reelection of Barack Obama to the presidency, as well as the election of a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.

Jesse Richman is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Old Dominion University, and Director of the ODU Social Science Research Center. David Earnest is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Old Dominion University, and Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters.

Their research findings will be published in a forthcoming article in the journalElectoral Studies.

This was Richman and Earnest’s research methodology. Using data from theCooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), the two political scientists:

Assembled a sample of 32,800 for the 2008 election, 339 of whom were non-citizens.
Assembled a sample of 55,400 for the 2010 election, 489 of whom were non-citizens.
Matched respondents to voter files so as to verify whether they actually voted.

Here are the political scientists’ research findings:

Although most non-U.S. citizens do not register to vote, let alone vote, however –
More than 14% of non-U.S. citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they had registered to vote.
6.4% of non-citizens voted in 2008.
2.2% of non-citizens voted in 2010.
Richman and Earnest concluded that enough non-citizens had voted in 2008 and 2012 so that their votes changed the outcome of those elections.

Estimated Voter Turnout by Non-Citizens
	2008	2010
Self reported and/or verified	38 (11.3%)	13 (3.5%)
Self reported and verified	5 (1.5%)	N.A.
Adjusted estimate	21 (6.4%)	8 (2.2%)

In the words of Richman and Earnest:

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. 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. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina.Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.

Richman and Earnest also found that photo I.D., a policy advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud, “appears strikingly ineffective.” As many as three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.

The political scientists propose that public information may be a better method to reduce voting by non-citizens because the more educated non-citizens were less likely to violate the law by voting. As an example, in 2008, no non-citizens with a college degree or higher voted, in contrast to non-citizens with less than a college degree who were significantly more likely to have voted. This suggests that non-citizen voting may be due to a lack of awareness about the illegality of their voting.

Based on the 2008 and 2012 precedents, Richman and Earnest justly ask if control of the Senate in 2014 will be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens.

If early voting in North Carolina is any indication, the answer is “Yes.”

Kenric Ward reports for Watchdog that early voting began last Thursday, Oct. 24, in North Carolina, and already the state’s election board had found 154 ineligible non-citizen voters on its poll lists.

Those 154 illegal immigrants are on NC’s voter rolls, courtesy of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA designees can be up to 31 years old. When illegal immigrants are certified under DACA, deportation proceedings are frozen. That opens a window for those illegals to obtain driver’s licenses in North Carolina, said James Johnson, president of North Carolinians For Immigration Reform and Enforcement.

NC’s State Board of Elections are examining more than 9,000 additional voters’ names for their questionable legal status. But they do not expect to finish checking before early voting had begun. Special counsel Brian LiVecchi told Watchdog.org that “We don’t know what we don’t know.”

“We want to know how such a large number of non-U.S. citizens were ever registered to vote in the first place,” said Jay DeLancy, executive director of the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina. “There is clearly a system failure here and we need the Board of Elections and the DMV to help the Legislature and the public understand where the problem lies.”

NC State Rep. Christopher Mills (R-Hampstead) wrote a letter to the Board of Elections citing “an extremely large number of non-citizens” on North Carolina’s voter rolls. Mills asked that election officials explain the “likely procedure in which these non-citizens were allowed to register to vote … and the board’s actions for immediate removal.”

So what do we do about this outrageous travesty?

I suggest the following:

Contact your Congress critters and DEMAND that they look into this. Click here.
Contact your state’s attorney general, who is supposed to oversee elections, and DEMAND that they inspect the voters’ registrations to spot and eliminate non-U.S. citizens. Click here to find out the name, address, and phone no. of your attorney general.
Publicize by disseminating this post to your family, friends, and contacts via e-mail and social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)!!!