Trump may be right about winning popular legal vote
Bob Unruh/WND
President-elect Donald Trump set off a media wildfire when he tweeted out this message last Sunday: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Now, voter-integrity activists say he may be right about winning the popular vote among qualified registered citizens – the only people legally permitted to participate in federal elections.
Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, who waged a years-long fight against the IRS over its targeting of conservative groups, said she’s convinced Trump is correct.
Her group “absolutely supports President-elect Trump recent comment about the impact of illegal voting, as reflected in the national popular vote.”
She promised reliable estimates of the number of illegal-alien voters are on the way.
“We are still collecting data and will be for several months, but our intent is to publish a comprehensive study on the significant impact of illegal voting in all of its many forms and begin a national discussion on how voters, states and the Trump administration can address this growing problem,” she said.
She later told SiriusXM program host Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily that the impact of illegal-alien voters could be significant.
“We put out a statement shortly after the president-elect’s comments came out, and we said that we support the belief that there could, in fact, have been millions of illegally cast votes, and we are doing tremendous amounts of research to try to get to some of those answers.”
Engelbrecht continued: “We set ourselves up, Alex, in a system where for a long time, nobody’s wanted to get answers, so questions haven’t been allowed to be asked. That’s the paradigm that we now have to shatter.”
She said the number of fraudulent voters could be high.
“When we talk about fraud in sound bites, we often sort of get caught up in, oh, you know, the dead are voting, people are being bused in. Do those things happen, and are those all worth of debate? Absolutely. But the real problem that we face is that fraud has been institutionalized. We have set up processes that allow for non-citizens among other ways, but non-citizens certainly to flood into our rolls.
“And that’s just one way that we set ourselves up with the potential for illegal votes.”
Establishment media outlets have insisted Trump has no evidence to back his claim of illegal voters.
He was reacting to the recount effort in three states by Green Party candidate Jill Stein that has been joined by Democrat Hillary Clinton, who during the campaign challenged Trump to promise he would respect the election results. Clinton now leads by 2 million in the national popular vote tally.
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Evidence of impact
While there are no reliable figures yet on the number of illegal-alien voters, indications of the impact are there, said the Heritage Foundation’s Hans Von Spakovsky.
He cited to WND Tuesday a case brought by the Public Interest Legal Foundation that found some 1,000 non-citizens registered to vote in just a eight Virginia counties shortly before the election.
And those were all legal residents
Many, he noted, already had voted in prior elections.
“We wouldn’t have known about them if the foundation hadn’t sued to get the information,” he said.
And, he noted, a 2013 survey by John McLaughlin found 13 percent of non-citizen Hispanics admitted they were registered to vote.
“There needs,” he said, “to be serious questions answered.”
Just months before the 2016 election, he had warned that several organizations, such as the League of Women Voters and the NAACP, were fighting efforts to clamp down on non-citizens voting illegally, and they were being aided by the Justice Department.
He said the organizations sued in Washington to reverse a decision by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that would have allowed Kansas and other states, including Arizona and Georgia, “to enforce state laws ensuring that only citizens register to vote when they use a federally designed registration form.”
“While states must register voters who use the federal form, states can ask the EAC to include instructions with the federal form about additional state registration requirements. Some states are now requiring satisfactory proof of citizenship to ensure that only citizens register to vote,” he explained.
The Constitution gives states the power to prescribe “qualification requisite for electors.”
Von Spakovsky explained: “The left disdains the balance the Framers adopted in the Constitution and objects to this delegation of power to the states. They prefer to see power over elector eligibility centralized in Washington, D.C.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the commission could refuse such requests, but the states could sue then to establish that “a mere oath will not suffice to effectuate its citizenship requirement.”
However, in the case then, “a single bureaucrat” ultimately denied the state request for verification of citizenship.
The DOJ was no help, he explained, since it was “the same cadre of lawyers that dismissed a voter-intimidation charge against members of the New Black Panther Party who physically threatened voters in Philadelphia to help President Barack Obama get elected in 2008.”
They also are the same team waging a constant war on voter ID “and other election integrity measures,” he found.
It may have been the AP that inadvertently revealed the strategy to such a program when it cited the fact that the election system in the U.S. is so dispersed that it would be impossible to mount a coordinated fraud across the states.
That’s true, but how about a years-long campaign to specifically forbid states from requiring confirmation of citizenship to register to vote? Over the years, hundreds of thousands of unqualified voters could accumulate in tens of thousands of precincts nationwide.
It’s undisputed that the illegal-alien population in the United States is well beyond the widely cited figure of 11 million.
Voter-fraud prosecuted in 46 states
William Gheen, president of the non-profit Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said Trump “is absolutely correct that large volumes of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential race predominantly for Democrat candidates and illegal immigrants were brought across the borders to reinforce Obama and Hillary Clinton in these elections.”
“Obama himself admitted on video to Spanish language audiences comprised of illegal immigrants that illegals would face no scrutiny or hindrances registering to vote and voting, both of which are felonies and deportable offenses,” he pointed out.
“We will work hard to ensure that American voters are never faced with their votes being stolen and muted by foreign nationals again. Let the contentious and historic 2016 elections be remembered as the point where Americans secured our borders and ballots from illegal immigration!”
ALIPAC cited sources, including the Pew Trust.
ABC reported Pew study author David Becker said he discovered no voter fraud
“We found millions of out-of-date registration records due to people moving or dying, but found no evidence that voter fraud resulted,” he said.
But the Pew study, released during the last election, specifically said its research “underscores the need for registration systems that better maintain voter records, save money and streamline process.”
The current systems, it noted, “are plagued with errors and inefficiencies that … fuel partisan disputes over the integrity of our elections.”
ALIPAC released dozens of pages of documentation showing 46 states have prosecuted or convicted cases of voter fraud, more than 24 million voter registrations are invalid, more than 1.8 million dead voters are still on rolls and more than 2.75 million Americans are registered to vote in more than one state.
The group also said the Florida New Majority Education Fund, Democratic Party of Florida and the National Council of La Raza currently are under investigation for alleged voter-registration fraud.
ALIPAC said that while Stein and Clinton “try to delegitimize President-elect Trump’s historic win on November 8, 2016, by calling for recounts, their strategy can be quickly turned into a nightmare for the Democratic Party and SEIU political machinery that willfully engaged in mass election fraud using a host of George Soros financed organizations and operatives.”
“Republicans, conservatives, Trump supporters, and all Americans that value fair and secure elections should be encouraged to turn their attention to the vast Democrat voter fraud that made the race much closer than it should have been,” the group said.
Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies said that if one looks at the likely 21 million non-citizens in the United States, based on the 2015 American Community Survey, there is the high probability that a good number voted.
After all, a 2 million or so vote advantage for Clinton could consist of votes from only about 10 percent of that population.
But he said there’s no evidence available yet that would document an election result based on those votes.
But if the nation has a practice of forbidding states from qualifying voters, what would be the one other thing needed to create an open door for fraud?
President Dan Stein at the Federation for American Immigration Reform has the answer.
“The United States does not currently have an immigration policy, let alone a principled one,” he said on Tuesday.
“The new administration must lead the nation in formulating an immigration policy that sets and enforces limits on legal immigration; eliminates – to the greatest extent possible – illegal immigration; and protects American workers, taxpayers, and our most vulnerable citizens.”
He said the solution would be multifaceted, including repealing “all Obama administration executive policy decisions that have effectively exempted nearly 90 percent all immigration law violators from enforcement, including the unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.”
He also said the legislation that provides incentives and rewards for illegal immigration needs to go, such as the “birthright citizenship,” and amnesty needs to be dropped entirely.
Also, there must be an end to the practice of “sanctuary” cities and states where officials vow not to follow federal law and enforce immigration requirements, he said.
“True immigration reform must begin with the recognition that our policies exist to serve and protect the vital interests of the American people. This principle has been glaringly absent from our policy for the past 50 years and from recent attempts to reform our policies,” he said.
“The American people have spoken very clearly in this recent election. They want illegal immigration stopped. They want a more limited immigration policy that admits people who are most likely to make the greatest contributions to our nation. FAIR’s Priorities for the 2017 Presidential Transition provides the new administration and Congress with a clear plan for implementing an immigration policy that serves identifiable public interests and upholds our national values,” he said.
Trump ‘raised eybrows’
ABC News couldn’t let go of Trump’s tweet on Illegal-alien voters even by Tuesday, when it said he “raised eyebrows Sunday when he said, without providing evidence, that he would have won the popular vote had ‘millions of people’ not voted illegally.”
CNN said Trump “alleged Sunday, without evidence” that millions voted illegally, and Politico said he was “making false accusations.”
The Associated Press joined in criticizing Trump’s comments by pointing out that it found “no evidence of widespread tampering or hacking that would change the results of the presidential contest.”
The news organization quoted experts.
“For one, it would be highly impractical. The nation’s election system is decentralized, a patchwork of state laws whose differences would be nearly impossible to target on a large scale, said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice,” AP wrote.
Weiser told the reporter: “You would need to have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people conspiring with insiders and with one another. To keep a conspiracy of that magnitude secret is just unthinkable.”
And Election Center chief R. Doug Lewis said, “The election process is not rigged anywhere in America.”
However, experts say both legal and illegal immigrants, if not encouraged, certainly are not discouraged, from voting. That’s since voter ID laws have been quashed routinely, penalties have been suspended and the millions of illegal immigrants have been given benefits typically belonging only to citizens, such as health care and housing.
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