Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Rousmaniere, a business writer who lives in Woodstock and manages the blog, workingimmigrants.com
[D]o non-citizens vote in American elections? Recent evidence says no. Drawing from scant nationwide legal enforcement evidence and a recent study by voting fraud allegers on Virginia, the number of non-citizens voting in Vermont may be 76, easily explained away by data gaps in naturalizations. But if true, that accounts for an infinitesimally small number of the 298,000 Vermonters who voted in November 2016.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who co-chairs the Trump administration’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (Vice President Pence is chair), announced on Nov. 30, 2016, that it was a “reasonable estimate” that 3.2 million people could have voted illegally based off a survey of the 2008 presidential election.
The Kansas secretary of state said data showed that 11.3 percent of non-citizens in the United States “said” they had voted in that year’s election. There are 16.9 million immigrants who are non-citizen 18 years or older. Kobach is in effect alleging that 11.3 percent of them, or 1.9 million voted illegally. If all of his 3.2 million voted illegally, that implies that 19 percent of non-citizens voted. On the face of it, this allegation implies massive, orchestrated campaigns of voter fraud.
Kobach and allies lean on a 2014 article authored by Old Dominion University researchers that “6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.”
The article was based on no original inspection of records or surveying, but rather on a study by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of surveys done in 2008 and 2012. The CCES researchers disparaged the Old Dominion article, asserting that it drew unwarranted inferences from a very small sample size (such as under 200 positive results from a total survey population of 19,000). The title of the CCEs December 2015 refutation: “The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys.”
The Virginia report compared motor vehicle registration data (which has a field for citizen status), registration rolls, and actual voter counts.
In May of this year a Public Interest Legal Foundation-sponsored report, “Alien Invasion,” relied on matching data entered one time into one public database with data entered at another time in another public database. If one compares its estimate of non-citizens voting, this population come to 0.6 percent of all adult non-citizens in Virginia, and a tiny share of total voting in Virginia.
The Virginia report compared motor vehicle registration data (which has a field for citizen status), registration rolls, and actual voter counts. I have adjusted its figures, which covered most but not all voter districts, in order to show complete statewide estimates. The adjusted figures indicate that over a six-year recent period 2,415 non-citizens were registered to vote and voted at least once. These are definitely not the figures that Kobach and allies want to hear about. The reason is that the 2,415 is less than 1 percent of the approximately 400,000 non-citizen adults living in Virginia at the time.
The reasonable explanation is that many or most of the 2,415 persons either became citizens after they took out or renewed their driver’s licenses, or mistakenly listed themselves as citizens. (This is consistent with survey errors found by CCES). During that six-year period, about 70,000 non-citizens became naturalized during these years.
In Vermont, about 12,500 adult non-citizen are residing today. Using the same ratios of Virginia, this comes to 76 non-citizens who supposedly voted at least once since 2012. Over these years, there are probably about 2,200 naturalizations.
Kobach has asked Vermont to send its voting registration data to the executive branch. We can only image how he will come up with over 1,000 non-citizens voting in the Green Mountain State.
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