Media off base on issue of illegal voting

IBD:

Turns Out, Noncitizens Did Vote In November, Only Question Is How Many?

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Trump is certainly guilty of wild exaggeration with his claim that he would have won the popular vote if millions of noncitizens hadn't illegally cast ballots. But the press reaction to Trump's statements was even more off base.

Time magazine, for example, declared: "We already know that ineligible noncitizens do not vote in American elections — including the 2016 election."

It and other news outlets pointed to a paper by Harvard researchers that claimed "the likely percent of noncitizen voters in recent U.S. elections is zero."

Politico ran a piece by one of those Harvard professors, who stated emphatically that "There is no evidence that noncitizens have voted in recent U.S. elections."

No evidence?

Turns out, there is evidence, if you look for it. The latest comes from an investigation by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who found 821 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state and 126 of them had voted in prior elections, including 82 who cast ballots in 2016. These aren't huge numbers, but they are more than zero.

This finding, reported by local news outlets on Monday, isn't the first to provide evidence of noncitizen voting.

A 2013 analysis of Virginia voter registrations in eight counties by the Public Interest Legal Foundation found 1,046 noncitizens who were registered to vote, nearly 200 of whom had voted in prior elections.

Heritage Foundation elections expert Hans von Spakovsky notes that when he was on the Fairfax County Electoral Board in Virginia, "we discovered close to 300 noncitizens who had illegally registered in our county, about half of whom had also illegally voted in prior elections."

A 2013 survey of Hispanics by McLaughlin & Associates found that 13% of those who said they were not U.S. citizens said they were registered to vote. And the 2014 study that those Harvard professors tried to debunk suggested that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008, and 2.2% voted in 2010.
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Texas has also prosecuted cases for illegal voting.  I suspect these liberal groups wanted to deny the existence of illegal voting in hopes of suppressing any investigation that might lead to prosecutions because they believe Democrats benefit from these votes.  They also oppose voter ID laws which would make it more difficult for noncitizens to vote.