As much as the media tell us that concern over illegal immigration and vote fraud is a sign of paranoia, they continue to report, however quietly, on huge holes in the system like the Missouri-based scam that netted more more than 3500 UDAs (undocumented aliens) driver’s licenses.
On Friday, one of the participants in that scam, Martin Lara-Rodriquez, himself in the country illegally, was sentenced to a year in federal prison. The case dates back to 2012 and the scam to 2009.
In 2012, a federal grand jury indicted 14 conspirators, six of whom belonged to one family in St. Joseph, the city whose Missouri Department of Revenue office was at the conspiracy’s center. According to prosecutors, they made more than $5 million selling licenses to other UDAs.
As the Kansas City Star reports, the scam “involved the use of fraudulently obtained birth certificates and social security cards.” What the Star is reluctant to say, however, is just how widespread are these conspiracies and how much they cost the taxpayer.
California Senate Leader Kevin De Leon, a Democrat, has a good idea. In 2017, testifying before the Senate’s Public Safety Committee against President Trump’s action on immigration, De Leon admitted, “Anyone who has family members who are undocumented knows that almost entirely everybody has secured some sort of false identification.”
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.
The think tank 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 the number is any less than that in 2018.
Meanwhile, “moderate” Republicans lawmakers in Kansas seem to have convinced themselves that concern about illegal immigration and vote fraud disqualifies one to be governor. Right, those are Missouri problems.