More Than 800,000 Noncitizens May Have Voted in 2016 Election, Expert Says

Any numbers are rubbery but it is clear that there is a big problem

An election expert projects more than 800,000 noncitizens voted in the 2016 election and overwhelmingly for Democrat Hillary Clinton.

While substantial, that number doesn’t overcome Clinton’s 2.2 million popular vote lead over Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who won a decisive Electoral College triumph of 306 to 232.

On Sunday, the president-elect tweeted he would have won the popular vote had it not been for illegal votes cast. The Trump transition team on Monday cited nonpartisan studies on noncitizens voting and of faulty voter registration across the country. Only citizens 18 or older can legally vote.

“Extrapolating on data from several years ago certainly doesn’t substantiate the claim that Trump is making now,” Jesse Richman, an associate professor of political science at Old Dominion University, told The Daily Signal. “That could change. If there is a recount in Michigan and Trump loses by a few votes, then it’s very plausible that noncitizen voting made a big difference. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that.”

Richman was the co-author of a 2014 study that looked at noncitizen voting in the 2008 and 2010 elections. In the comparable presidential election year, the Old Dominion study determined 6.4 percent on noncitizens in the United States voted in the 2008 presidential election, and about 81 percent of those voters backed Democrat Barack Obama.

Richman applied those numbers to 2016:

The basic assumptions on which the extrapolation is based are that 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted, and that of the noncitizens who voted, 81.8 percent voted for Clinton and 17.5 percent voted for Trump. … 6.4 percent turnout among the roughly 20.3 million noncitizen adults in the U.S. would add only 834,318 votes to Clinton’s popular vote margin. This is little more than a third of the total margin. … Is it plausible that noncitizen votes added to Clinton’s margin? Yes. Is it plausible that noncitizen votes account for the entire nationwide popular vote margin held by Clinton? Not at all.

A December 2015 study led by Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard University argued the 2014 Old Dominion study was flawed and that “the likely percent of noncitizen voters in recent U.S. elections is zero.” Richman responded to the criticism and said suggesting zero percent does not hold up.

Trump transition team spokesman Jason Miller cited the Old Dominion study reported on in The Washington Post in 2014, as well as a Pew Research Center study from 2012 about problems with voter registration across the country.

“An issue of concern is that so many have voted that are not legally supposed to,” Miller told reporters in a conference call Monday.

He said this warrants more attention than the “shiny object” Jill Stein and the Green Party are using to push recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that have no chance of overturning the election.

Beyond the noncitizens voting study from Old Dominion, Miller pointed to the Pew study from 2012 that found 24 million voter registration records in the United States, or about 1 in 8, were “significantly inaccurate or no longer valid.”

The Pew study further found “1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters,” that “12 million records contain an incorrect address,” and that “2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.”

It would take a very high percentage of noncitizens voting to overcome the Clinton popular vote lead, said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors strong enforcement of immigration laws.

“If 10 percent of noncitizens voted, it would likely make a popular vote difference,” Camarota told The Daily Signal. “It’s not the Electoral College [Trump] is upset about. It’s the popular vote. I wish he wouldn’t focus on it. Bill Clinton got just 43 percent of the vote in 1992. How many states did he win more than 50 percent of the vote in?”

Trump could be correct about the number of illegal votes, but there is no way to know, said Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation who focuses on voter integrity issues.

“It’s possible he’s right, but we don’t know because there is no way to quantify, no system in place to identify noncitizens voting,” Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “The Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security should obtain state voter registration lists and check against noncitizen database. And the DOJ should start prosecuting noncitizens who are voting.”

Prosecuting voter fraud will have to be a higher priority under the Trump administration than under the Obama administration, said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog.

“It has got to be a priority I would think based on Mr. Trump’s rhetoric,” Fitton told The Daily Signal. “At least, make sure that only citizens are registered to vote. We need basic reforms to reassure people that elections are free and fair.”

SOURCE

*****************************

The National Tantrum

It’s hard to tell which group has lost its grip on reality more – liberal activists or their brothers and sisters in arms in the media. The activists are protesting, marching, rioting and vandalizing their way across lefty America, because conservative America wouldn’t tolerate it. Meanwhile, journalists are almost acting worse.

The activists are trying a multi-pronged approach. They are protesting/rioting. (It’s often hard to tell them apart with the alt-left.) Then they have organized a largely astroturf #NotMyPresident hashtag on Twitter. Next, they have begun to threaten and intimidate electors to overturn the election. And then, they’re claiming the electoral college win is illegitimate because they lost it. The alt-left even pushed a meme that pretended Mike Pence was gay.

Former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Symone Sanders (no relation) told CNN that the future of the Democratic party is without white leaders. Sanders told the world in her special bigoted way, "we don't need white people leading the Democratic party right now." I’m sure Trump’s communications team is sending her a Christmas card.

The tantrum among the major media is almost worse. News outlets did their goose-stepping best to pretend the neo-Nazis were somehow influential when they could barely muster a Producers remake. (Original, please.) Politico’s national editor Michael Hirsh resigned after publishing home addresses of an alt-right moron. Hirsh wasn’t done. He also said, “Our grandfather’s brought baseball bats to Bund meetings,” and then asked if people wanted to “join” him. That was a bit more mob-inciting than Politico wanted.

The global left has freaked out so badly that George Monbiot just wrote a piece listing, “The 13 impossible crises that humanity now faces.” Trump is No. 1 and his cabinet choices and impact are scattered throughout.

SOURCE

*************************

Widespread Coverage of Liberal Hate Crimes ‘Study’ Shows Media’s Fake News Problem

So much for taking America’s “fake news” problem seriously.

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, there’s been an abundance of hand-wringing over the “fake news” that supposedly is rampant on social media.

Yet missing has been any kind of serious searching among the mainstream media about whether it could learn any lessons from this election—and whether reporters and editors are holding themselves accountable to their supposed values of objectivity and rigorous reporting.

And a new “study” presents Exhibit A as to why the mainstream media should reconsider its own practices.

The Southern Poverty Law Center—an organization that calls the Family Research Council an “extremist group” because of its socially conservative views on LGBT matters—reported Nov. 29 that “in the 10 days following the election, there were almost 900 reports of harassment and intimidation from across the nation.”

“Many harassers invoked Trump’s name during assaults,” the report continued, “making it clear that the outbreak of hate stemmed in large part from his electoral success.”

Cue the widespread coverage:

    “Nationwide, there have been more than 867 incidents of ‘hateful harassment’ in the first days following the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center says,” reported CNN.

    “In the 10 days following the November election, SPLC said it collected 867 hate-related incidents on its website and through the media from almost every state,” wrote the Associated Press.

    NBC News headlined its piece on the study “Southern Poverty Law Center Reports ‘Outbreak of Hate’ After Election.”

    The Washington Post’s headline blared, “Civil rights group documents nearly 900 hate incidents after presidential election.”

There’s just one issue: The Southern Poverty Law Center didn’t confirm these “nearly 900” incidents actually happened.

“The 867 hate incidents described here come from two sources—submissions to the #ReportHate page on the SPLC website and media accounts,” the SPLC report states. “We have excluded incidents that authorities have determined to be hoaxes; however, it was not possible to confirm the veracity of all reports.”

In other words, who has any idea if these incidents actually happened or not?

Yet, the fact that there was no verification of these incidents didn’t stop the media from covering this “study.”

And let’s not pretend there’s no to very little chance that a Trump opponent would make up a hate crime story.

Just consider this reported hate incident in November: “The men used a racial slur, made a reference to lynching, and warned him this is Donald ‘Trump country now,’ according to the report he gave police,” reported the Boston Herald.

Yet the man wasn’t telling the truth. The Herald reported that Kevin Molis, police chief of Malden, Massachusetts, said “it has been determined that the story was completely fabricated.”

“’The alleged victim admitted that he had made up the entire story,’ saying he wanted to ‘raise awareness about things that are going on around the country,’” the newspaper added, continuing to quote Molis.

So maybe 867 hate crimes happened in the first 10 days after the election. Or maybe 5,000 did. Or maybe five did.

Maybe 10,000 did—and most of them were directed at Trump supporters, not opponents. (Let’s not forget the man beaten in Chicago while someone said, “You voted Trump.”) Who knows?

The SPLC should realize that playing around with facts is no laughing matter.

In 2012, a gunman entered the headquarters of the Family Research Council “with the intent to kill as many employees as possible, he told officers after the incident,” reported Politico. The 29-year-old man, identified as Floyd Lee Corkins II, did shoot and wound a security guard. His motivation?

“Family Research Council (FRC) officials released video of federal investigators questioning convicted domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins II, who explained that he attacked the group’s headquarters because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified them as a ‘hate group’ due to their traditional marriage views,” the Washington Examiner reported.

Ultimately, regardless of what the Southern Poverty Law Center does, the media shouldn’t be giving a platform to faux studies like this.

But maybe it’s not surprising, given attitudes like President Barack Obama’s. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine published Tuesday, the president griped about the reach of Fox News Channel—and then complimented Rolling Stone: “Good journalism continues to this day. There’s great work done in Rolling Stone.”

Yes, that Rolling Stone—the news outlet that published the completely discredited University of Virginia gang rape story. In early November, “jurors awarded a University of Virginia administrator $3 million … for her portrayal in a now-discredited Rolling Stone magazine article about the school’s handling of a brutal gang rape [at] a fraternity house,” the Associated Press reported.

It’s tough to hold the media accountable when even the president seems willing to brush aside true instances of fake news.

SOURCE

******************************

From my Twitter feed

Ann Coulter: With his reckless Taiwan phone call, Trump has wantonly placed America's interests ahead of China's.

Paul Joseph Watson: The media is freaking out because Trump spoke to a democratically elected leader, and this might offend a dictatorship. Let that sink in.

**************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

***************************