As a follow up to my last post, I have thought it would be important to point out that the Republicans might have a point when it comes to the illegal immigrant and their desire to vote.
Namely, do they? Do immigrants, not yet citizens, vote?
Yes:
How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.
So, 14% of non-citizens REGISTERED to vote and 6.4% voted in 2008 and 2.2% voted in 2010. That sounds like a lot, but is it?
Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
Yup – again, it is a lot. And further, may have given Franken his seat as well as Obama North Carolina.
Notably, the authors of that study (which has been subjected to a lot of criticism) also said that Voter ID doesn’t work to prevent more than a small minority of their identified cases. http://ww2.odu.edu/~jrichman/NonCitizenVote.pdf