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Non-citizen voting is a crime that would be easy to catch if it was happening on a large scale, that Republican governors and secretaries of state have the tools and an incentive to catch, and which nevertheless you don't see large numbers of people getting caught for.
There have been a few serious attempts to investigate non-citizen voting, and they generally catch a low-double figure number of illegal votes per state.
Not at all. I have never had my ballot vetted in accordance with IL law ever since I moved to Chicago. I can go to the polling place and intentionally sign my name in a way that is completely opposite of how I signed on my registration. And they still give you the ballot without asking for additional verification of who you are.
Chain of custody? Forget about it. There are boxes stacked and intermingled and ballots spilling around.
The same is true in another city where I attended college. Reality is elections are completely insecure in cities and on campuses. The sole difference is the age of the people perpetuating the fraud/incompetence.
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I've mentioned this before (because I never tire of referencing my history nerd reading), but Robert Caro's description of the Texas senatorial election in 1948 was illuminating.
Short version is that both parties trucked large numbers of illegals across the border to vote. This was known. Even relatively honest politicians knew that that's how things worked in Texas and if they didn't get involved directly and kept it arms-length enough to have plausible deniability, they still knew.
Presumably Texas was not the only state in which this happened (it's just the state Caro was interested in because he was researching Lyndon Johnson).
Could such a thing happen today? It would be more difficult, what with more surveillance, more information systems, more people with phones, more data analysis, etc. I doubt you could have party officials literally trucking hundreds of illegals across the border and herding them through polls without someone noticing. But would it be impossible for some operatives to plan and execute an operation large enough to influence a tight election? With enough plausible deniability that if caught, they could be disavowed by whoever they were benefiting? No, I don't think it's impossible. There are still a lot of remote counties without a lot of monitoring.
I am not saying this is actually happening (and I doubt it is, at least on a large scale), but I wouldn't dismiss concerns about illegal voting, even if they are frequently exaggerated for political purposes. The fact that it could be done means we should take serious precautions against it.
The point I am making is not about which forms of voter fraud could be done - we all agree that it is easy for a non-citizen to register and vote in most states. The argument I was making is that non-citizen voting (unlike certain other forms of voter fraud, like filling in your wife's postal vote) is easy to catch if anyone wants to catch it. For example, the fraud in Texas in 1948 was caught, but the authorities declined to prosecute because they were fine with that kind of thing. Attitudes to democracy in America were different then - Illinois practiced blatant ballot-rigging (actual ballot-rigging, in that the published vote counts did not match the votes cast) - again on a bipartisan basis and as an open secret - into the 1960's.
The claim I am making is that: Premise 1) If large numbers of non-citizens were voting, this would be easy to detect. Premise 2) In the current year, there are numerous red state officials with the means, opportunity and motive to investigate non-citizen voting. Some actually have done. Premise 3) We don't detect large numbers of non-citizens voting, even when red state officials go looking for it. Conclusion: There are not, in fact, large numbers of non-citizens voting in American elections.
Bussing illegals into Texas in 1948 is a case where 2 and 3 didn't apply - nobody bothered to investigate, and the perps were caught (but not punished) anyway. In the current year, that isn't happening, and if it was the perps would be punished.
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How is it easy to catch? Someone did a post recently on California and how easy it would be for illegals to vote.
California has little relevance here; the party that illegal immigrants will likely vote for has the state locked down anyway, and even 200% turnout wouldn't give California more HoR seats or Electoral College votes.
I was using California as an example.
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You underestimate how hard it can be. Especially when the evidence is routinely destroyed and/or the people who control the data refuse to hand it over.
In my state, someone did go county by county inspecting voter rolls and identifying non-citizens voting. They made it through a couple counties before the Democratic governor caught on and instructed all offices to stop cooperating with them. Then to add insult to injury, when the incomplete report was released, the Democratic spin machine acted like it was a nothing burger because it "only" found several thousand noncitizens registered to vote, and a smaller proportion of several thousand actually voting, "in the whole state".
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