I found an interesting piece on the effects of non-citizen voting on the popular vote totals from Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University. Essentially, based on his research:
- Large numbers of fraudulent votes by non-citizens are likely to have been cast in the 2016 general election.
- Voting by non-citizens cannot account for all of Sec. Clinton’s popular vote plurality.
- It could have increased her electoral vote total.
or, said another way, President Trump’s claims are poppycock but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a problem.
Here’s the meat of his observations:
Is it plausible that non-citizen votes added to Clinton’s margin. Yes. Is it plausible that non-citizen votes account for the entire nation-wide popular vote margin held by Clinton? Not at all.
If the percentage of non-citizens voting for Clinton is held constant, roughly 18.5 percent of non-citizens would have had to vote for their votes to have made up the entire Clinton popular vote margin. I don’t think that this rate is at all plausible. Even if we assume that 90 percent voted for Clinton and only 10 percent for Trump, a more than fourteen percent turnout would be necessary to account for Clinton’s popular vote margin. This is much higher than the estimates we offered. Again, it seems too high to be plausible.
Some will find that heartening, some dismaying, some both. So large a number of votes cast illegally by non-citizens easily sway certain close elections, particularly at the local level.
AFAICT, he has no real examples of any actual real illegals voting. He is extrapolating from a guess. We should call this a WAG, not an estimate.
Steve
I would be very surprised if a significant number of illegal immigrants voted. I would think that most would not want to risk getting caught or committing a felony.
If Trump really wants to look into this, he should examine exploitation of absentee ballots. There is actually quite a bit of evidence suggesting that large numbers of people may be voting in Florida as well as another state. Trump could tweet and put pressure on Florida’s government to join the two major cross-reference databases.
Uhh, fraud in absentee ballot voting is well known and there are lots of examples. Since absentee ballot voting seem to favor Trump’s party, I don’t expect him to chase it.
Steve
He admits later in the piece that is in effect a WAG:
We do not have a national election, we have 50 state elections, overseen by 50 secretaries of state, of whom none to the best of my knowledge has produced data supporting even the low end guess.
“Since absentee ballot voting seem to favor Trump’s party”
Is there any evidence that is the case?