Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[AlabamAlum]

FFS. A person has to be a U S citizen to vote.

To register to vote, most states only ask for a ss# and a DL number (and the latter is not a mandate, they just ask) and a number of non citizens have both of those.

Further, I’m not sure how stringent the vetting process is. In other words, for non citizens without the ss#, are they taking the ss# and actually verifying it or can a made-up or shared ss# slip through? I’m sure it varies state-by-state but I can imagine things like that slipping through the cracks in some areas.

[CGVT]

Not enough to move the needle. Just like Grandma voting twice. Bullshit talking point.

Illegals do not vote.

Let the pearls go. It will be ok

[AlabamAlum]

CGVT,

Such uncalled for viciousness.

I’m not sure I have seen definitive evidence of how many do -or don’t do this. You MUST have since you have determined that such things do not “move the needle”. As far as I know, little research has been done to re-vet voting rosters for valid socials or checking immigration status of non-citizens with valid social security cards. In fact, I looked for such criteria and could find nothing listed. Sure, I could find research on voting fraud, but very little exists with that specific criteria as an investigative point. Share with me your voluminous research with that specific research criteria.

Here is a nice article that suggests that it not not only happens but has likely affected elections. But they admit at the beginning that almost no reliable data or research in support of either side exists.

Abstract

In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections. Although such participation is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration. This study examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants. We find 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. Non-citizen votes likely 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.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...61379414000973

Perhaps the above is apocryphal. It is not a journal that I am familiar with.

Anyway, hit me with your multiple data and research with the specific parameters I asked about and I will review it. Because only a fucking idiot would take a hard stance on an issue without substantial, verified, apples-to-apples evidence.

[CGVT]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ed/6237115002/


Fact check: Claim that voting noncitizens affected 2020 election outcome is unverified



The claim: Joe Biden received extra votes in battleground states from noncitizens


Since Election Day, President Donald Trump’s campaign has launched a series of lawsuits calling into question election results in some key battleground states, and alleging fraudulent voting practices that affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, USA TODAY has reported.

Experts say the lawsuits will likely fail, but a public policy research firm found merit in the Trump campaign’s complaints.

An estimated 234,570 extra votes were cast by noncitizens in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, enough to deliver a win for President-elect Joe Biden, according to a report from Just Facts Daily. The website is an extension of conservative-leaning research institute, Just Facts.

“These estimates account for just one type of election fraud, and they tend to understate it because they depend on Census surveys, which are known to undercount noncitizens,” Just Facts' James D. Agresti wrote.

The claim is similar to one put forward by the Trump campaign after the 2016 election. Trump lost the popular vote, the campaign said, because noncitizens accounted for more than 800,000 votes for then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Snopes debunked this claim in 2017.

The recent lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona – states where Trump lost – do not address similar themes, instead asking judges to prevent certification of results. State leaders and election officials have said there is no evidence of voter fraud, USA TODAY reported.



Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution mandates a count of every resident in the United States, regardless of citizenship, every 10 years to determine apportionment, or the number of congressional seats per state, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A 2012 report found that 1.5% of the Hispanic population was undercounted in the 2010 census, along with 2.1% of the Black population and 4.9% of the American Indian and Alaskan Native population living on reservations.

Racial minorities may have been undercounted during 2020 census collection because of the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of the Trump administration's decision to end collection a month early, according to Reuters. Demographics experts also blamed a likely drop in census participation among undocumented immigrants on the administration's bid to add a question about citizenship to the survey, per Reuters. (Though the Trump administration had sought to include a citizenship question in this year's census, the president ultimately abandoned the effort after the Supreme Court ruled against it, USA TODAY reported.)




Registration for voting in federal elections is reserved for U.S. citizens, according to the National Council of State Legislatures. The right to vote in local municipal or town elections has been extended to noncitizens in 11 states.

Whether voting by mail or in-person, registrants voting in a federal election supply evidence of their residence, a signature or another form of verification when submitting a ballot, according to Robert Brandon, founder of the Fair Elections Center.

"The handful of times when people try to do something, they're caught and they’re indicted. ... It’s only a handful of individuals and that’s not going to change an election," Brandon told USA TODAY about voter fraud.

Agresti argues some noncitizens manage to vote in federal elections despite preventive measures. But allegations of voter fraud by noncitizens tend to be "exaggerated or unfounded," according to a 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a center-left institute. Few people purposefully register to vote if they are knowingly ineligible.

"Given that the penalty (not only criminal prosecution, but deportation) is so severe, and the payoff (one incremental vote) is so minimal for any individual voter, it makes sense that extremely few non-citizens would attempt to vote, knowing that doing so is illegal," the Brennan Center observed.



A 2014 study, "Do noncitizens vote in US elections?", by Old Dominion University researchers Jesse T. Richman, Guishan A. Chattha and David C. Earnest found "very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections." But it did find that some noncitizens do vote. Most noncitizens who voted in the 2008 presidential election chose Barack Obama and those who voted in the 2010 midterms voted for Democrats.

Richman, a political moderate, told Wired magazine in 2017 that some have misinterpreted his research. "Trump and others have been misreading our research and exaggerating our results to make claims we don't think our research supports," he said.

The results Richman, Chatta and Earnest used in their analysis were from an opt-in internet survey designed for citizens only. Michael Jones-Correa, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study's critics, told Wired that any responses from noncitizens were included because of error.

Jones-Correa also said the sample size is too small for a representative sample of the noncitizen population. The researchers were able to verify when 40% of 339 noncitizen respondents to the 2008 survey voted. In the 2010 survey, 489 respondents identified themselves as noncitizens, and more than 3% reported voting that year, according to the study.

Just Facts used this study's findings as the foundation of its own examination of the 2020 election results.

"Just Facts’ study applies the party vote breakdown of 82% Democrat and 18% Republican to the 2020 election. By subtracting these illegal votes for Trump from the illegal votes for Biden, the study arrives at the figures above for the extra votes that these fraudulent activities have netted Biden in the battleground states," Agresti wrote. He also reiterated this point in an email to USA TODAY.

Census estimates of the number of foreign-born residents in key battleground states were used to calculate the figures Agresti referenced. According to Just Facts Daily, potential votes cast by noncitizens were estimated, on the high and low end, at:

• Arizona: 51,081 ± 17,689
• Georgia: 54,950 ± 19,025
• Michigan: 22,585 ± 7,842
• Nevada: 22,021 ± 7,717
• North Carolina: 46,218 ± 16,001
• Pennsylvania: 32,706 ± 11,332
• Wisconsin: 5,010 ± 1,774

Two researchers who praised the study, Michael Cook and Andrew Glen, are not election experts.

Cook is a financial analyst, according to his LinkedIn profile page.

Andrew Glen was a professor in the Math department at the United States Military Academy, West Point, but retired several years ago, according to LTC Christopher Ophardt, Director of Public Affairs and Communications at the school.

"He was an academy professor. He is a professor emeritus. His discipline is statistics," Ophardt told USA TODAY.

Glen also co-authored another Just Facts article with Agresti about a correlation between anxiety and mandated self-isolation amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Agresti denied a conflict of interest with respect to the 2020 election study.

"Colleagues offering opinions of each other’s work is commonplace and is not a conflict of interest," Agresti told USA TODAY. "Dr. Glen’s academic credentials are impeccable, and he built them through decades of scrupulous scholarship. He would not speak highly of this research if he thought differently, and if he had a problem with it, he would say so."



Uncovering exactly how many noncitizens may have voted for Biden would be impossible without an investigation into voter rolls, a fact Agresti acknowledged to USA TODAY.

"To confirm the results would require cross-checking 'voter rolls against other databases that contain information on citizenship status,' but some states withheld public voting data from the Trump administration 'under the guise that the data is personal,'” Agresti said.

Restrictions on access to voter data vary by state, according to the NCSL. Voter information is publicly available in Georgia and Wisconsin, but available upon request in Michigan and Nevada. In Arizona and North Carolina, political parties are provided with voter rolls and they are available at election offices for inspection. Data is accessible to the public in Pennsylvania during business hours, and voters' addresses can be provided to political parties upon request.

Arizona is the sole state that asks registrants for country of birth, according to the NCSL, but this information is confidential.

Considering how few noncitizens register to vote in federal elections and the accessibility of voter information, Just Facts' assertion that illegal votes affected the outcome of the 2020 election is unfounded.

[lineygoblue]

:::pops popcorn:::

[AlabamAlum]

CGVT,

Did you read what you cited? Most of those cites completely affirm that scant reliable data exists and/or that non citizens have voted - which was my point. And a couple were irrelevant and did not address anything we have been discussing.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Conservatives have asserted again and again and again that "tons" of illegals are voting yet every time they promise to deliver the proof, they fail

As an example, in 2019 Texas initially asserted that they had caught red-handed 100,000 non-citizens voting. Then they were forced to walk that claim back entirely when they started to check up on individual cases one by one. In the end, I believe there were less than 100 cases of "possible" illegal voting and virtually no charges were made against anyone.

The article below also mentions that in 2012, the Florida Republican govt (under Rick Scott) initially claimed to great fanfare that they had found 180,000 illegal voters registered to vote. They quickly revised that number down to 2,600 after just a basic vetting. And after a more thorough investigation of those 2600, the number eventually became 85. 85 people in the entire state of Florida that were registered to vote there that the state couldn't determine if they were actual citizens or not.

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02...ed-boondoggle/

AA you can also google counterarguments to that Jesse Richman study you linked to. I remember posting articles refuting it several years ago. It's fairly discredited. I'm not going to spend a long time finding the exact same counterarguments I found before but here's a start.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...itizen-voters/

Even the author of the study admits he got some things wrong.

Now even its authors concede that it probably overstated the amount of noncitizen voting. “The high-end estimates are likely incorrect,” Jesse Richman, one of the co-authors of the study and a political science professor at Old Dominion University, said in an email exchange on Wednesday. In a post online, he also said that the findings do not support Mr. Trump’s contention that millions cast ballots illegally.

Mr. Richman still maintains that some small percentage of noncitizens vote in American elections. But the debate over this study has moved on. It’s no longer about whether millions of illegal votes were cast, but whether there’s any evidence for noncitizen voting at all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/u...t-hold-up.html

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/author...eryones-wrong/

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...bunked-214487/

[AlabamAlum]

From what you cited, for example:

Uncovering exactly how many noncitizens may have voted for Biden would be impossible without an investigation into voter rolls, a fact Agresti acknowledged to USA TODAY.

"To confirm the results would require cross-checking 'voter rolls against other databases that contain information on citizenship status,' but some states withheld public voting data...

...and this:

A 2014 study, "Do noncitizens vote in US elections?", by Old Dominion University researchers Jesse T. Richman, Guishan A. Chattha and David C. Earnest found "very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections." But it did find that some noncitizens do vote. Most noncitizens who voted in the 2008 presidential election chose Barack Obama and those who voted in the 2010 midterms voted for Democrats.

And I wasn’t even talking about the last Presidential election (specifically, anyway).

But take an Arizona general election. If upwards of 50,000 non citizens voted for Governor in 2015, you don’t think that could move the needle? And the methodology of how they came up with the up to 51,000 non citizen votes in Arizona (for example) is creative but nebulous and unverifiable. In other words, it could be way more or way less.

In short, the consensus of what you posted generally supports my position that (a) it’s possible that non citizens vote, (b), evidence suggests that they do, (c) we don’t know how many do nationally and (d) it does not sufficiently affirm your position that it does not “move the needle.” Indeed, it may not, we just do not have incontrovertible evidence of that position.

As I suggested, either side is supposition and, further, the people who staunchly take up one side and dismiss the other side out of hand with such scant evidence and research usually do so out of blind partisanship.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Just in the past 4 years under Trump, somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 people became naturalized citizens each year. That's 2,800,000 to 3,600,000 people nationwide who would have showed up as an ILLEGAL VOTER on the 2016 ballot rolls that could legally vote in 2020. When ballot rolls don't get updated right away, skeptics pounce on that huge number and think "A-Ha! We've got them THIS time!". But upon a more thorough inspection of individual cases, the number of people (potentially) illegally registered to vote always gets scaled back dramatically.

That's what happened in Texas recently and what happened in Florida almost a decade ago.

https://www.immigrationhelp.org/learning-center/u-s-immigration-stats-citizenship-by-naturalization#toc-how-many-citizenship-by-naturalization-applications-does-uscis-approve-each-year-

[Dr. Strangelove]

From what you cited, for example:



...and this:



And I wasn’t even talking about the last Presidential election (specifically, anyway).

But take an Arizona general election. If upwards of 50,000 non citizens voted for Governor in 2015, you don’t think that could move the needle? And the methodology of how they came up with the up to 51,000 non citizen votes in Arizona (for example) is creative but nebulous and unverifiable. In other words, it could be way more or way less.

In short, the consensus of what you posted generally supports my position that (a) it’s possible that non citizens vote, (b), evidence suggests that they do, (c) we don’t know how many do nationally and (d) it does not sufficiently affirm your position that it does not “move the needle.” Indeed, it may not, we just do not have incontrovertible evidence of that position.

As I suggested, either side is supposition and, further, the people who staunchly take up one side and dismiss the other side out of hand with such scant evidence and research usually do so out of blind partisanship.

1) The person who authored the Old Dominion study you cite no longer completely stands by his work. Read my links. There's a bunch of links in this 538 article alone linking you to other studies refuting the statistical analysis in the original 2014 study. Why should the original ODU study carry more weight than this Harvard counterargument, when the original author himself admits his work was flawed.?

https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/news/perils-cherry-picking-low-frequency-events-large-sample-surveys

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-noncitizen-voters/

2) Even on top of that the author of the ODU study (Richman) says Trump and Republicans have misrepresented and exaggerated his original findings (which he no longer backs 100%). Also in the links I posted above.

3) The burden of proof remains on those making the claim that illegal voting occurs by the tens of thousands or even millions. One side clearly has more evidence supporting it than the other. When ballot-by-ballot audits are performed, as they were in Georgia and Texas very recently, these allegations always fall apart.

[AlabamAlum]

DSL,

You see, that’s my point: we don’t know the true numbers. Most of the research parameters were fulfilled when it was determined that the voter card and roster matched and was not duplicated. Also, voting numbers of the 14 million social security card holding non citizens was not investigated at all. Likewise, cross state verification was not (and could not) be done in many cases.

I don’t know how many non citizens have voted. To say it doesn’t happen is inaccurate and to come up with a definite number is currently closer to opinion.

[AlabamAlum]

My final thoughts on this:

DSL, would you agree:

(a) it’s possible that non citizens vote,
(b) some evidence suggests that it it has occurred
and (c) because of limitations of vetting citizenship status from voting rosters, we don’t really accurately know how many improper votes have been cast.

And this seems to be evolving into a discussion of the Trump-Biden election. That was not my focus. Simply, is it possible, if so, do we accurately know how many, and how was the citizenship status ascertained the few times it was researched. Because most of what I have seen centered mainly on whether a person voted only once and was a voter card issued for every name on the registry. For privacy concerns (and sometimes by state law), SS numbers from the voter applications were not usually released to researchers. Certainly, I think we can say true research into actual citizenship status was not satisfactorily done.

My instinct is that it has not happened in sufficient numbers to affect national elections. I think it far more likely to impact smaller, local elections. But, yet, likewise, that is just opinion.

[iam416]

CGVT,

Did you read what you cited? Most of those cites completely affirm that scant reliable data exists and/or that non citizens have voted - which was my point. And a couple were irrelevant and did not address anything we have been discussing.

I can answer that initital question based on experience.

[iam416]

(a) it’s possible that non citizens vote,
(b) some evidence suggests that it it has occurred
and (c) because of limitations of vetting citizenship status from voting rosters, we don’t really accurately know how many improper votes have been cast.

These points are obviously correct and it's clear you were decisive in your victory last night while the goalposts you were kicking at were jetting all over the place.

However, again, this isn't the big issue. The big issue remains a Quasi-Open Door policy for any immigrant that comes from a poor country and the overwhelming desire to reward people who didn't follow the rules. The former, I guess is the big issue. The latter would really bug me if I was a legal immigrant. I just can't imagine being in a traffic jam, watching some douche roll up on the shoulder and cut in at the front AND then, I guess, applauding his bravery, fortitude and courage. Fuck that.

The other point remains pretty much bedrock -- The Media chose "kids in cages" when unaccompanied children were being detained at the border under PDJT ("Babies in cages!" from Kamala). The Ds actually held a House hearing on "Kids in Cages." Now that Biden is doing the same thing PDJT did (which was the same thing Obama did), it's "teens" in facilities that are like jails. This point re The Media's coverage of this issue is unassailably true.

[Jeff Buchanan]

The big issue remains a Quasi-Open Door policy for any immigrant that comes from a poor country and the overwhelming desire to reward people who didn't follow the rules.

This.

My comment yesterday about the difficulty in obtaining the facts upon which COVID conclusions are being drawn applies here. Key issues get obscured, e.g., is the virus being contained or isn't it?..... Or, isn't the immigration problem in the US one that can be solved by enforcing current law?

Both governments and the MSM filter the facts to support the messaging they wish to impart. For example, last night the "Last Four" played for two spots. The reporting of the games this morning was not about who won those games but rather that the men's training room was bigger and better equipped than the women's.

The NCAA March Madness Tournaments aren't about basket ball, instead they are used to frame "social justice and equity issues." These are the exact words that the script called for in the report that was broadcast nationally. I'm not in the least bit surprised. Disgusted? Yep ...... except for MSU getting bounced.