Posted on 06/03/2015 1:10:01 PM PDT by concernedcitizen76
In the interest of helping out the editorial writers and pundits of media outlets who don’t think voter fraud occurs, I wanted to note just a few recent cases (and readers interested in seeing almost 200 more such cases can do so at this link).
In McAllen, Texas, two campaign workers (known as politiqueras in local parlance) who bribed voters with cocaine, beer, cigarettes and cash during a 2012 school board election have been sentenced separately to serve eight and four months in prison, respectively. U.S. District Court Judge Randy Crane called this election fraud “terrible” and said that “our country requires that our voting process be clear and free of fraud for democracy to work … it’s dangerous for this to occur without consequence.”
A couple in Le Sueur, Minn., was charged with felony voter registration fraud for lying about where they lived so they could vote in a school bond referendum in another town.
A woman in Dothan, Ala., was sentenced to six months in prison for her part in a voter fraud scheme that got a city commissioner re-elected. She was the second of the four people charged to have been found guilty of voter fraud in the case, which may have involved more than 100 absentee ballots.
Bronx politician Hector Ramirez has been arrested after a 242-count grand jury indictment charged him with a massive voter fraud scheme that involved tricking voters into letting Ramirez and his staff illegally vote their absentee ballots. The local prosecutor told the New York Daily News that Ramirez, who lost two prior tries at a state assembly seat, “made a decision that he was not going to lose, under any circumstance.”
A state appeals court upheld a ruling voiding a 2013 commission election in Weslaco, Texas, in which dozens of illegal votes were cast in an election won by only 16 votes. The illegal votes included individuals falsely claiming to reside in the city and improper “assistance” that told voters who to vote for—a great example of how even a small amount of fraud can make a difference in close elections.
In Philadelphia, the setting of the infamous 2008 New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, four local election officials have been charged with casting multiple votes in the city’s 18th Ward in a precinct in which three of them didn’t even live and were not registered to vote. This case illustrates the importance of poll watchers, because it was a local poll watcher who saw what happened and brought it to the attention of the district attorney’s office. This is the same district attorney, Democrat Seth Williams, who indicted two Democratic state legislators last year for accepting bribes in exchange for voting against a voter ID bill after the Pennsylvania attorney general, Kathleen Kane, also a Democrat, refused to prosecute the case.
On May 7, the Board of Immigration Appeals of the Executive Office for Immigration Review held that a Peruvian citizen who illegally registered and voted could be deported for violating federal law. Margarita Del Pilar became a permanent legal resident of the U.S. in 2004. She promptly applied for an Illinois driver’s license and registered to vote at the same time, then cast a ballot in the 2006 congressional election. When she applied for naturalization in 2007, she admitted in the INS interview that she had voted in an American election. Of course, if she had not applied to become a citizen, she could have continued to illegally vote with almost no chance of being detected.
This case of the Peruvian woman is just another example of how easy it is for noncitizens to vote in our elections. And there are apparently some politicians who want to ensure that they can continue to do so without getting caught.
One recommendation I have made to state legislatures is to implement legislation that requires court clerks to notify state election officials when individuals called for jury duty are excused because they are not U.S. citizens. Courts get their jury lists from voter registration rolls, and it is a requirement that those who register to vote affirm under oath they are U.S. citizens. Individuals called for jury duty also have to affirm, again under oath, that they are U.S. citizens. And yet in a 2005 study, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration rolls over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens.
The Virginia legislature recently passed a common-sense election reform bill (HB 1315), which would have required county jury commissioners to provide local election officials with the names of individuals called for jury duty who turned out to not be U.S. citizens. Local registrars could then remove those illegally registered voters and provide information to local law enforcement and the U.S. Justice Department for investigation and possible prosecution.
We know this is a problem in Virginia, where I formerly served on a local county electoral board. As I have explained previously, we fortuitously discovered in 2011 that 278 individuals who were not U.S. citizens had registered to vote in Fairfax County, 117 of whom had voted in state and federal elections. After removing them from the voter rolls, we notified both the U.S. Justice Department and the local district attorney about the problem. Neither did anything about it.
Yet Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a former fundraiser for the Clintons, vetoed this bill on April 30. There is not a single public policy reason for vetoing such simple, straightforward legislation—unless you want to ensure that noncitizens can continue to register and vote illegally in Virginia elections with little fear of being discovered, particularly if you believe that a majority of these individuals will support your party’s candidates. Virginia is, after all, now a purple state and every vote will count in the 2016 presidential election.
According to a 2012 research published by the Pew Center for the States, more than 1.8 million dead U.S. citizens are still registered to vote. The research has also found that 2.75 million people have active voter registrations in more than one state, and at least one in every eight active voter registrations is no longer valid.
(Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative.)
This is how Loretta Sanchez beat Bob Dornan for her first term, and it’s how she will win Boxer’s Senate seat.
The GOPe won’t lift a finger to bring about secure voting. Like Mexico uses. Really.
This 2014 article is also interesting.
“Research Shows Voter Fraud May Have Swung Key 2008 Elections. Al Franken may have won on illegal votes”
http://freebeacon.com/politics/research-shows-voter-fraud-may-have-swung-key-2008-elections/
By Stephen Gutowski
October 28, 2014
Research documenting the effects of non-citizens voting in American elections found that enough non-citizens voted in 2008 that they may have caused a significant impact on the outcomes of several key races.
The research, performed by Old Dominion University professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest, was broken down Tuesday in the Washington Post.
In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.
Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.
Their research found that more than 14 percent of non-citizens voted in either the 2008 or 2010 elections. The impact of those votes may have been quite large, the professors said.
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.
They also said illegal votes could have tipped North Carolina’s 2008 Presidential vote in favor of Barack Obama. Voter identification laws were identified as marginally effective in preventing this form of voter fraud, according to the research.
We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.
Instead, Richman and Earnest identified confusion and lack of legal knowledge on the part of those voting illegally as the core issue in their research.
An alternative approach to reducing non-citizen turnout might emphasize public information. Unlike other populations, including naturalized citizens, education is not associated with higher participation among non-citizens. In 2008, non-citizens with less than a college degree were significantly more likely to cast a validated vote, and no non-citizens with a college degree or higher cast a validated vote. This hints at a link between non-citizen voting and lack of awareness about legal barriers.
We should first attempt to seriously make our voting system fraud proof and implement a system like the one in Israel. Since that is almost impossible and per the government we now have is living proof that a vote fraud conviction should result in an immediate public hanging for any and all vote fraudsters no matter the degree of the fraud. Life in prison with no chance of parole is another option but 4 months or 6 months or any sentence less than life is a joke.
I know people who immigrated here legally from third-world countries who are stunned that we don’t have better security on our elections. At least back home they did the purple finger thing.
Seven years after I left Ohio I got a card from the county elections board asking if I wanted to renew my registration. Always wondered who had been voting for me there.
What’s the point of elections if 14 percent of the voters are noncitizens?
“Their research found that more than 14 percent of non-citizens voted in either the 2008 or 2010 elections. The impact of those votes may have been quite large, the professors said.”
That’s more than one vote in eight in US elections cast by non citizens! Another way of looking at it. In 2008, 132.6 million people voted. 18.6 million votes were cast by non-citizens. That means that 18.6 million votes cast by citizens in 2008 were nullified.
We’ve lost the country. Washington DC, 70 square miles of endldess corruption and criminality by a few hundred people, has killed the greatest nation on earth, 320 million people occupying 3.6 million square miles.
bkmk
We've got bigger problems if MEXICO has a more robust electoral process than the US....
“We’ve got bigger problems if MEXICO has a more robust electoral process than the US.... “
It does, and we do.
In some precincts 140% of the entire population voted. Fraud? What fraud?
Rand Paul's immigration speech...The Republican Party must embrace more legal immigration.[Posted on 03/19/2013 7:04:07 AM PDT by Perdogg]
Unfortunately, like many of the major debates in Washington, immigration has become a stalemate-where both sides are imprisoned by their own rhetoric or attachment to sacred cows that prevent the possibility of a balanced solution.
Immigration Reform will not occur until Conservative Republicans, like myself, become part of the solution. I am here today to begin that conversation.
Let's start that conversation by acknowledging we aren't going to deport 12 million illegal immigrants.
If you wish to work, if you wish to live and work in America, then we will find a place for you...
This is where prudence, compassion and thrift all point us toward the same goal: bringing these workers out of the shadows and into being taxpaying members of society.
Imagine 12 million people who are already here coming out of the shadows to become new taxpayers.12 million more people assimilating into society. 12 million more people being productive contributors.
Rand Paul calls on conservatives to embrace immigration reformLatinos, should be a natural constituency for the party, Paul argued, but "Republicans have pushed them away with harsh rhetoric over immigration." ...he would create a bipartisan panel to determine how many visas should be granted for workers already in the United States and those who might follow... [and the buried lead] "Imagine 12 million people who are already here coming out of the shadows to become new taxpayers...[Posted on 04/21/2013 1:52:42 PM PDT by SoConPubbie]
[but he's not in favor of amnesty, snicker, definition of is is]
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