Investor’s Business Daily, January 28, 2019

Voter Fraud: When President Donald Trump brought up the idea that noncitizens were casting ballots in elections, the reaction was fast and furious. Such a thing, if it exists at all, is exceedingly rare, we were told. But when one state decided to take a close look, it found something quite different.

After a yearlong voter-fraud probe, Texas discovered that, lo and behold, 95,000 people identified as noncitizens had voter registrations. What’s more, 58,000 of them voted in one or more Texas elections.

When Attorney General Ken Paxton led the state’s investigation, he noted that Texas had already found 165 noncitizens in four counties who had cast 100 illegal votes in two years.

Voter Fraud Mystery

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Sure, Trump almost certainly exaggerated the number of noncitizen voters. But in response, Time magazine declared that we “know that ineligible noncitizens do not vote in American elections.” Vox.com, the “explanatory” news site, derided Trump as “indulging the long-standing myth of the noncitizen voter.” Harvard researchers said that there is “no evidence” that noncitizens vote.

Less than a year after he put it together, Trump disbanded his commission, not because it didn’t find anything, but because it faced a fusillade of lawsuits and stonewalling from state election officials.

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Because whenever anyone does look, what they find, as Texas did, is plenty of evidence that people who aren’t U.S. citizens are casting ballots.

After the 2016 elections, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted found 821 noncitizens registered to vote in that state, of whom 126 had voted in 2016 or earlier elections. A 2013 analysis of voter registration by an outside group — not the state government — found 1,046 noncitizens registered in Virginia. A 2011 study found 12,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Colorado, 5,000 of whom did so in the 2010 midterm elections.

Not Widespread Enough?

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Now, after claiming this problem didn’t exist at all, the left says it doesn’t matter because it’s not “widespread.” But this is a clever dodge. Election fraud doesn’t have to be widespread to be effective. In fact, the very purpose of election fraud is to flip extremely close elections. That doesn’t take widespread voter fraud, just carefully targeted efforts.

In the 2008 election in Minnesota, the now-disgraced Al Franken won by a tiny 312 vote margin. His victory gave Senate Democrats a filibuster-proof majority, which let them pass ObamaCare. One study found that noncitizen voting in the election could have decided the outcome.

The 2018 midterms featured an unusually large number of races decided by a relative handful of votes.

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Why Are Dems Indifferent?

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The most likely explanation for Democrats’ indifference is that they benefit from sloppy enforcement of election laws. We recently pointed out that several House elections in California could have flipped from red to blue thanks to these sorts of fraudulent efforts. And California election officials seem clueless — or utterly indifferent — to whether noncitizens are voting in state elections.

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