A 2014 report published by the Washington Post documented how non-citizen foreign nationals voting in U.S. elections “likely gave” Democrats the critical 60th vote they needed to pass Obamacare.

The report explains that non-citizens who illegally voted in 2008, and who electorally “tended to favor Democrats”, could have handed the 2008 Minnesota Senate election to Al Franken, which gave 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,” the report writes.

The 2014 Washington Post article titled “Could Non-Citizens Decide The November Election?” was written by Jesse Richman and David Earnest, two associate professors of Political Science and International Studies at Old Dominion University. Their research relied upon data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES).

The professors found “that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections.”

As the Washington Post article stated:

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? […] Our best guess… is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010… 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.

The report came the same week that the North Carolina State Board of Elections found the names of 145 individuals on voting rolls who were ineligible to vote because they were illegal immigrants who had been recipients of Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty (DACA).

As Breitbart’s Caroline May reported at the time:

According to a Winston-Salem Journal report, the State Board of Elections discovered the potential illegal voters… when the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles ran a search for DACA licenses… DACA beneficiaries in North Carolina are able to obtain drivers licenses, but they are not able to vote. The Journal notes that it is likely more ineligible people may still remain on the voting rolls. “Nearly 10,000 names on the rolls are tagged by the DMV as ‘legally present,’ according to elections and transportation officials. But that doesn’t mean that all 10,000 are ineligible to vote at this time. These are license holders who were not U.S. citizens when they got a license.” […] According to the report, earlier this month the SBOE officials did a sample cross-check of 1,600 of the 10,000 “legally present” names against a Department of Homeland Security database and found… that six percent were ineligible [to vote], meaning if the ratio held for the whole 10,000, 600 people would be ineligible.

During a recent North Carolina rally, Donald Trump warned that the election is being “rigged”. Trump later tweeted:

The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016

Despite its own reporting on voter fraud and the role non-citizen foreign nationals likely had in delivering Democratic victories in close elections, the Washington Post now seems to be disregarding its own coverage on the issue in order to characterize Trump’s claims as “ridiculous,” “unsubstantiated” and part of “broad conspiracy theories”.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has similarly sought to denounce the concerns of voter fraud expressed by his Party’s nominee– insisting that the election results will be inherently secure. Ryan’s spokesman told Buzzfeed that the Republican House Speaker is “fully confident” the election will be carried out “with integrity”.

The statement from Ryan’s office is remarkable given the fact that, as the 2014 Washington Post report suggests, the health care law Ryan claims to oppose may only have been possible because non-citizen foreign nationals illegally cast their ballots in U.S. elections.