A comprehensive report released by the think tank, Just Facts, suggests that, if anything, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has underestimated the number of illegal aliens voting in Kansas.
This news will come as shock to editorialists across the state. When Kobach announced his candidacy for governor last week, the Topeka Capital-Journal huffed, “Kobach is convinced that illegal voting (especially among undocumented immigrants) is a vast crisis, but the evidence just isn’t there.” Kobach fired back, “My office has identified 128 specific noncitizens who registered or attempted to register to vote in Kansas since 1999.” Kobach cited an Old Dominion University study that suggested as many as 18,000 non-citizens were registered in Kansas.
According to Just Facts even those numbers may be low. The argument Just Facts makes is compelling. Although some states require applicants to submit full Social Security numbers and perform checks on these numbers, most do not. Compounding the problem is that In 2013, according to the chief actuary of the U.S. Social Security Administration, some 700,000 illegal immigrants used “fraudulent birth certificates” to obtain Social Security numbers and that 1.8 million illegal immigrants worked by using Social Security numbers “that did not match their name.”
In 2017, California Senate Leader and Democrat Kevin De Leon testified before the Senate’s Public Safety Committee against President Trump’s action on immigration, saying, “Anyone who has family members who are undocumented knows that almost entirely everybody has secured some sort of false identification.”
Knowing that Hispanics vote Democratic by a roughly 3 to 1 ratio, early in 2016 the Obama administration supported a court injunction to prevent Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia from requiring people to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. Obama acknowledged publicly that that voting records are not cross-checked against immigration databases and “there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating, et cetera.” This was all calculated to increase Democratic turnout.
Given the laxity of controls, it should not be a surprise that according to a 2013 McLaughlin & Associates scientific bilingual poll of Hispanic adults 13 percent of the non-citizens reported they were registered to vote. And these numbers are probably lower than they ought to be. In a 2008 Harvard/YouGov survey, for instance, 14 percent of self-declared non-citizens who said they were not registered to vote were found to be registered when matched to a database of consumer and voting data.
Based on the evidence and their analysis of it–the report is exhaustive–Just Facts argues that 800,000 to 2.2 million non-citizen Hispanics stated they were registered to vote in 2013. There is no reason to believe that it was any less than that in 2016 especially with a Trump presidency threatening. As the activists understood, voting illegally is the quickest way to get oneself deported.
Fresh off its truthfulness forum, the Topeka Cap-J might want to take a fresh look at the “evidence.”