It’s the real foreign influence on our elections — and now even the liberal Los Angeles Times has tacitly admitted its significance. It’s all included in a New Year’s Day piece about how young illegals “made flipping control of the House a personal quest,” as the paper put it.

Of course, the Times used slick marketing and called these foreign activists “Dreamers.” As American Thinker’s Monica Showalter writes, while the paper’s tale was a “heartstring-tugging, tear-jerking” story meant to evoke sympathy, it “accidentally did more to raise questions about the issue of ballot-harvesting in California than any raving right-wing warning tome could ever do.”

“The Times describes how California's famed ballot-harvesters, who flipped places such as Orange County blue in the last midterm, aren’t actually citizens,” she continued. “They did it by ‘helping’ voters fill out, and turn in, and continue to turn in, ballots from otherwise uncommitted voters until they got the result they wanted.”

The Times provides detail, writing:

In California, Dreamers like [featured illegal Gabriela] Cruz phoned voters, walked precincts and protested outside Republican lawmakers’ offices, reaching people who had not been called or visited by either party. Their efforts helped boost turnout among Latinos in this year’s midterm election — 29 million nationwide were eligible to vote, according to the Pew Research Center — which is projected to surpass levels higher than in past presidential election years, political analysts said.

An analysis of data from eight states by the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA found the Latino vote grew by an estimated 96% from 2014 to 2018, compared with 37% among non-Latinos. The surge, researchers said, helped move 20 House districts held by Republicans to Democratic control in California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, New Mexico, Florida, New Jersey and New York.

To grasp the impact of this, realize that approximately 70 percent of Latinos vote Democrat. Moreover, there’s good reason to suspect that “vote-harvested” Latinos break left by far wider margins.

Just consider the example the Times provides, of Ronald Silva, 41. Vote-harvester Cruz found him in Modesto “smoking a cigarette on a tattered old couch behind a group home,” the paper tells us. “He politely tried to wave her off until she reminded him he had a right that she as an immigrant without citizenship didn’t have.”

“Half an hour later, she was helping Silva look up candidates as he filled out his ballot by the light of her phone,” the paper continued. “‘I’m glad you guys came,’ he said. ‘I was going to leave it in my drawer.’”

Why does this remind me of the old joke, “Everyone has a book in him — and in most cases that’s where it should stay”?

Unfortunately, the joke is on us. As Showalter points out, the Times

story doesn’t say what the DREAMer/ballot-harvester would do if the voter decided to vote some other way from the way the DREAMer/ballot-harvester wanted the indifferent man to fill the ballot out.”

Naturally, the incurious reporter also omits the obvious question: Did the foreigner tell the indifferent man how to fill out the ballot? Let’s just say the reporter showed a strong interest, based on the rest of her reportage, to protect the foreigner from any accusation of illegal voting.

But only a fool would think she didn’t tell the indifferent man who to vote for, effectively voting by proxy.

Note that at issue here aren’t silver-haired ladies who become poll workers to earn a few extra bucks or in deference to civic duty. These harvesters are devoted left-wing activists motivated by intense political passions (e.g., Cruz is a “protester” as well). You “harvest” because you want to profit off a specific crop — in this case, Democrat votes.

Thus, as Showalter concludes, such harvesting “pretty well amounts to foreign nationals voting, without any fear of prosecution. That changes the nature of the election, and in fact, the U.S. republic itself. Voting up until now has been a practice reserved for citizens. Today, non-citizens vote, by getting hold of indifferent Americans, and filling in the ballots by proxy, no fingerprints visible.”

Yet even more can be said. I’ve long asserted that get-out-the-vote drives, whatever their species, are self-serving efforts to rally the idiot vote masquerading as noble exercises in “democracy.” Many people don’t vote, and for good reason: They have little interest in politics.

This is significant because interest is a prerequisite for competence. Did you ever hear, “Johnny was so uninterested in baseball that I just knew he’d make it to the major leagues!”? If people don’t have the get up and go to get out and vote voluntarily, it follows that they don’t have the greater impetus necessary to inform themselves on the issues — in which case they shouldn’t vote.

Unfortunately, such people also lack political convictions and thus can be easily manipulated — especially by passionate activists making ethnic appeals (often in a foreign language).

Also relevant, remember that the Times stated Cruz found Silva at a “group home” — where he was living at age 41. The lack of specificity is curious. Was this a home for the mentally ill? For ex-cons? The homeless? Where was this activist going to harvest votes and how vulnerable were the harvested people?

Sadly, though, this is just the latest example of vote-fraud shenanigans. Note here that Democrat operatives have been caught on hidden camera planning vote fraud, a Democrat New York City election commissioner admitted in 2016 that there is a “lot of vote fraud,” there was a claim that more than three million non-citizens voted in 2016, and a 2014 study found that enough illegal aliens cast ballots to sway close races.

Moreover, for those insisting such ideas are mythical, know that there have already been more than 1,000 actual vote fraud convictions, as the Heritage Foundation documents here. This is, also note, within the context of a system that doesn’t thwart vote fraud, but facilitates it.

So what’s the real foreign influence on our elections? As the top commenter under Showalter’s piece put it, “13 Russians can influence the election via Facebook. Yet, 20 Million illegals can’t. Democrat logic.”

It has always been said that a fifth column in your midst can be deadly. In light of this, care to hazard a guess on how many “fifth columns” lurk amongst us today?

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