3 ms·

Illegal immigrants can't vote, have never been able to vote, and there's absolutely no evidence that they've ever voted more than a random one-off that's almost

Illegal immigrants can't vote, have never been able to vote, and there's absolutely no evidence that they've ever voted more than a random one-off that's almost always caught and prosecuted. Lying on your voter registration form is a felony and it's the height of internet addled smooth-brain delusion to insist that vast swaths of illegal immigrants are going to commit felonies that include providing their name and address to vote in an indirect democracy because one of the political parties is marginally less hostile to them.

opinion-is-bad 3y ago
Illegal immigrants are counted by the census and total population is used to allocate congressional districts. High rates of illegal immigrants in a district therefore increases the voting power of the citizens living there. This allows illegal immigration to distort election results without anyone casting a ballot.
- tptacek 3y ago
  So are legal immigrants, along with everybody else.
- kasey_junk 3y ago
  I can see why Texas is excited to ship folks north.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  Which is an entirely different issue and not at all what any of the weird culture warriors that hang around on X have claimed is their concern.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jcranmer 3y ago
> there's absolutely no evidence that they've ever voted more than a random one-off that's almost always caught and prosecuted. To be more precise, the evidence is that non-citizen attempts to vote are somewhere on the order of one vote in ~hundred million. Screwing up voter registration forms is somewhat more common, but people who actually cross reference databases have found that the people who incorrectly mark "I want to be registered to vote" on their drivers license forms don't actually vote, which suggests it's mostly a mistake. There are issues with the amount of people on voter registration rolls who shouldn't be, but I should also point out that anytime someone claims ridiculously high numbers of potential misvotes, it's because they do coarse-grained database mismatches, and so they'll catch people whose names match. When you do the actual legwork, the voter registration issues go down dramatically, and the principal cause of that is that people aren't correctly unregistered when they move (and people don't attempt to vote in their previous place of residence, so there's very few actual vote attempts!) In fact, the largest category of illegal vote attempts I believe is felons who try to vote. Because the voter registration system does a poor job of actually working out who is a felon whose right to vote has been revoked.

opinion-is-bad 3y ago

Illegal immigrants are counted by the census and total population is used to allocate congressional districts. High rates of illegal immigrants in a district therefore increases the voting power of the citizens living there. This allows illegal immigration to distort election results without anyone casting a ballot.

tptacek 3y ago
So are legal immigrants, along with everybody else.
kasey_junk 3y ago
I can see why Texas is excited to ship folks north.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mikeyouse 3y ago
Which is an entirely different issue and not at all what any of the weird culture warriors that hang around on X have claimed is their concern.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jcranmer 3y ago

> there's absolutely no evidence that they've ever voted more than a random one-off that's almost always caught and prosecuted. To be more precise, the evidence is that non-citizen attempts to vote are somewhere on the order of one vote in ~hundred million. Screwing up voter registration forms is somewhat more common, but people who actually cross reference databases have found that the people who incorrectly mark "I want to be registered to vote" on their drivers license forms don't actually vote, which suggests it's mostly a mistake. There are issues with the amount of people on voter registration rolls who shouldn't be, but I should also point out that anytime someone claims ridiculously high numbers of potential misvotes, it's because they do coarse-grained database mismatches, and so they'll catch people whose names match. When you do the actual legwork, the voter registration issues go down dramatically, and the principal cause of that is that people aren't correctly unregistered when they move (and people don't attempt to vote in their previous place of residence, so there's very few actual vote attempts!) In fact, the largest category of illegal vote attempts I believe is felons who try to vote. Because the voter registration system does a poor job of actually working out who is a felon whose right to vote has been revoked.