4mo ago

Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare, yet Republicans are making it a major issue this election

apnews.com Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare, yet Republicans are making it a major issue this election

Federal law already allows only U.S. citizens to vote in elections for president and Congress. Yet Republicans are raising concerns about the potential for noncitizens voting in this year's elections.

It just made my morning to see that not only is the AP reporting this correctly, but the headline explicitly states the insane rarity of voter fraud. (Non-citizen or otherwise.) You have a better chance of getting a clear picture of Bigfoot than you do of having a voter fraud incident in your jurisdiction.

Mildly Infuriating @lemmy.world

Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare, yet Republicans are making it a major issue this election

apnews.com /article/noncitizens-voting-republicans-election-2024-immigration-09b86e6768f755fd875f3c51b0e8ea70

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24 comments

They don't care about reality. It's inconvenient.

Have these people never registered to vote or something? You already cannot do it without a social security number.
- That's the fun of raising the specter of voter fraud.
  No one who thinks it exists needs proof. It's like Bigfoot or Jesus or something.

Theyve been pissbabying about it for several elections now. (And yet Republicans historically are the biggest culprits for actual voter fraud, negligible as it is)

Just jumping in here to remind folks to Be Nice. We've had to clean up some comments in here already and if issues continue the thread will be locked.

These people need to redirect their followers' attention and anger onto literally anything but real circumstances. I'm so tired, it keeps working.
- Politics is just entertainment for most these days, it seems.
  
  Yeah. I am trying to find ways to disengage from the nonsense without disengaging from my like, actual responsibilities to my society. But the jury is extremely out on how I do that right now. Having my emotions (and everyone else's)manipulated for the gain of others no longer feels useful or like staying informed.

You have a better chance of getting a clear picture of Bigfoot than you do of having a voter fraud incident in your jurisdiction.
Just because you don't see it. doesn't mean it's not there. It would be entirely possible that there is no enforcement... and thus no records of those events happening.
Just like "illegal" border crossings. Current numbers state "Nationwide Encounters" is the number that CBP publishes. That's not the number of border crossings. That's the number of people that law enforcement has encountered and handled. This clearly ignores those who weren't "encountered" but still made it over. Part of that "encountered" number would be things like, "how many border guards do we have to actually 'encounter' these people?" If you fired 100% of the border guard force. Well your "Nationwide Encounters" stats would also drop to near 0. That doesn't mean that there are no longer any border crossings.
Poll workers collecting votes on voting day have no way to validate if your voter registration is not valid. It's either you're on the list or not. And in a lot of jurisdictions, simply getting a driver's license is enough to get your name on that list, even if you aren't allowed to vote otherwise.
Let's make some safe presumptions. There are at least some non-zero amount of people who vote illegally (ignore if they're "illegal immigrants" or not, just in general). How is discarding their votes and pursuing those felony charges enforced? Is that effective? If the answer is "poll workers", how are they supposed to know who on their registers are not supposed to be there in states that do auto-registration? There is discussion to have here without even bringing up a singular specific source of fraud like this article does.
- Multiple massive audits of elections in the US have shown that voter fraud is so rare that it can be described as non-existent. Claims of dead voters have been disproven, claims of mail votes being fraudulent have been disproven.
  The absense of evidence doesn't apply when we have evidence that the exiting votes are overwhemlingly proven to be valid on the voter's end.
  Now election fraud, where Republicans get people pulled off voter rolls and their votes discarded as a strategy to suppress votes does exist. But thst is election fraud, not voter fraud.
  
  If it happens so little that it doesn’t matter, then why relax the standard? It’s clearly working then. You spook people who think it could happen when you do that. There’s no positive to doing that. So why do it?
- Just because you don't see it. doesn't mean it's not there. It would be entirely possible that there is no enforcement... and thus no records of those events happening.
  My brother in Christ, I once pored over Kris Kobach's office records when he was Kansas's attorney general, and over the course of fifteen years he found less than ten cases of it affecting even fewer votes. That's a dude who built his entire career on the specter of voter fraud and even he couldn't prove its existence.
  Those records may still be on the ACLU's website for public consumption if you want to do the same.
  Voter fraud doesn't exist, and pretending it does is getting sillier by the day.
- Where the fuck do you think their list comes from?
  And in a lot of jurisdictions, simply getting a driver’s license is enough to get your name on that list,
  This is a gross misunderstanding of how DMV voter registration works. The standard voter eligibility checks which are already built into the voter registration process do not disappear at the DMV.

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