Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Dobbs
How can Lou Dobbs be so right on one thing and so wrong on another?!?!
In response to a story by CNN’s Dobbs in which he “told viewers that substantial evidence suggests that large numbers of non-citizens, including undocumented immigrants, are voting in federal elections and could be the deciding factor in November’s elections,” Truth in Immigration released a report that dispels the myth (which was started by The Heritage Foundation):
In a recent segment, The story primarily cites a recent report published by the Heritage Foundation. The report is written by former recess-appointed FEC Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky, whose troubling record on voting rights caused him to withdraw his name from consideration for a permanent FEC seat. Von Spakovsky’s report contains gross distortions and represents an attempt to support a policy agenda that would disenfranchise many U.S. citizens.
As one of his primary examples of non-citizen voters influencing U.S. elections, von Spakovsky cites the 1996 Congressional race in California between Republican Bob Dornan and Democrat Loretta Sanchez. Sanchez prevailed in this election by fewer than 1,000 votes, and Dornan contested the results. The House of Representatives then investigated whether invalid voters won the election for Sanchez. Von Spakovsky notes that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform ultimately dismissed the case, but suggests that the Committee did so only because it revealed just 624 noncitizen votes and 124 invalid absentee ballots. Von Spakovsky essentially ignores the Committee’s conclusion that the Sanchez/Dornan race was not compromised and that non-citizens did not vote in significant numbers. Instead, he speculates, without offering supporting evidence, that votes from undocumented immigrants probably accounted for the remaining votes. What he fails to note, moreover, is that 372 of the disputed noncitizen votes were cast by individuals who were officially sworn in as U.S. citizens before Election Day.
Most allegations of non-citizen voting, upon closer examination, likewise do not yield evidence of non-citizen voting. In the state of Washington in 2005, for instance, a private citizen asked county officials to investigate 1,668 registered voters who had
seemingly foreign names. To this day, none of these voters have turned out to be noncitizens. 10 In 2001, Milwaukee journalists conducted a review of 370,000 voting records between 1992 to 2000. The journalists found only four cases of possible non-citizen
voting, but it has never been established whether even these four voters cast invalid ballots.
Brad Friedman at BradBlog.com has the skinny on Hans von Spakovsky and it doesn’t pass the smell test.