Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Sentence First -- Verdict Afterwards
Yesterday the ever shrinking NYT had this "dictated by the DNC" unsigned editorial called Trump's Fraudulent Voter-Fraud Commission.
Here's the background. The states each have rolls of voters but no access to the federal rolls of non-naturalized resident aliens. The Obama administration wanted illegal voting (which usually is for Democrats) so the administration never compared the state and federal lists to see if any aliens were voting in the states. The responsible states wanted to see the non-citizen resident alien list but the Obama administration would never show it to any of the interested office-holders the states.
The whole purpose of the proposed commission is to go through the 50 state lists of voters and compare them at last to the federal lists of non-naturalized foreign born individuals living her to see how many, if any, voted. That would necessarily be an illegal vote. Only then will we know if it's a big problem or not. But the NYT already knows and uses that special knowledge to disparage our president in the smug, really annoying way the NYT and other Democrat-dictation-takers have. Behold.
To state the obvious, this isn't a commission. It's a self-driving vehicle programmed to arrive at only one destination: that strange fact-free land in which, according to Trump and many conservatives, hordes of foreigners and people without valid photo identification flood the polls, threatening the nations's election integrity.
The NYT says we know this is a non-existent problem (four links are given and discussed below) but the truth is we don't know. We've never cross-referenced the lists to see how many people are on both lists.
Rational people welcome more information. People who are afraid what the information will be don't want to know.
The first link, from 2014, is from a law professor at Loyola in Los Angeles. He didn't have the federal list of non-citizen resident aliens. He didn't find many illegal votes by non-citizens. No kidding.
The second link from 2007 is from writers at the NYT. They didn't have the lists either. They found it was a crime not often prosecuted. I believe that. It's hard to catch people when your not trying.
The next link, from 2014, is by two writers in the Election Law Journal (I think -- the link was broken). They also didn't have the lists, weren't looking for people who couldn't legally vote voting, only for people who pretended to be someone else when voting.
The last link, from this year, is a report of a survey by three authors from the Brennan Center for Justice. They didn't have the federal list either and drew the conclusion that because hardly any non-citizens were caught voting, it doesn't exist.
That's a strange conclusion. Maybe there are lots of them but they rarely get caught. I found each of these links wholly unpersuasive. I'd still like to see the number of people who are both on the federal list of non-citizen residents (and that list only has the know aliens living here--there are plenty the federal government doesn't know about) and are on a state list of registered voters.
It might not be a problem, but we don't know yet.
