Trump’s Right: Millions of Noncitizens Have Been Voting

President Donald Trump, in the leadup to the election and in the immediate aftermath of winning the White House, offered up fiery remarks about the voting trend of illegals and noncitizens, and how that trend has impacted U.S. elections in recent times — remarks for which he was soundly critized and condemned, by Democrats and members of his own Republican Party.

Well, looks like Trump is being proven right.

A nonpartisan research group in New Jersey, Just Facts, looked at the rate of noncitizen voting and found: in the 2008 election, as many as 5.7 million of them may indeed have cast ballots.

From the Washington Times:

“Just Facts President James D. Agresti and his team looked at data from an extensive Harvard/YouGov study that every two years questions a sample size of tens of thousands of voters. Some acknowledge they are noncitizens and are thus ineligible to vote.

“Just Facts’ conclusions confront both sides in the illegal voting debate: those who say it happens a lot and those who say the problem nonexistent.

“In one camp, there are groundbreaking studies by professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia who attempted to compile scientifically derived illegal voting numbers using the Harvard data, called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

“On the other side are the professors who conducted the study and contended that “zero” noncitizens of about 18 million adults in the U.S. voted. The liberal mainstream media adopted this position and proclaimed the Old Dominion work was “debunked.”

“The ODU professors, who stand by their work in the face of attacks from the left, concluded that in 2008 as few as 38,000 and as many as 2.8 million noncitizens voted.

“Mr. Agresti’s analysis of the same polling data settled on much higher numbers. He estimated that as many as 7.9 million noncitizens were illegally registered that year and 594,000 to 5.7 million voted.

“These numbers are more in line with the unverified estimates given by President Trump, who said the number of ballots cast by noncitizens was the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.”

The research comes on the heels of Trump’s executive order, signed last month, establishing a commission to determine the truth about illegal voting. The commission is headed by Vice President Mike Pence.

Again, from the newspaper:

“For 2012, Just Facts said, 3.2 million to 5.6 million noncitizens were registered to vote and 1.2 million to 3.6 million of them voted.

“Mr. Agresti lays out his reasoning in a series of complicated calculations, which he compares to U.S. Census Bureau figures for noncitizen residents. Polls show noncitizens vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

“‘The details are technical, but the figure I calculated is based on a more conservative margin of sampling error and a methodology that I consider to be more accurate,’ Mr. Agresti told The Washington Times.

“He believes the Harvard/YouGov researchers based their “zero” claim on two flawed assumptions. First, they assumed that people who said they voted and identified a candidate did not vote unless their names showed up in a database.

“‘This is illogical, because such databases are unlikely to verify voters who use fraudulent identities, and millions of noncitizens use them,’ Mr. Agresti said.

“He cites government audits that show large numbers of noncitizens use false IDs and Social Security numbers in order to function in the U.S., which could include voting.

“Second, Harvard assumed that respondent citizens sometimes misidentified themselves as noncitizens but also concluded that noncitizens never misidentified themselves as citizens, Mr. Agresti said.

“‘This is irrational, because illegal immigrants often claim they are citizens in order to conceal the fact that they are in the U.S. illegally,’ he said.”