Elections: President Trump, refusing to back down from his claim that millions of illegal votes tipped the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, now wants a comprehensive review of voter integrity in the United States. Whatever Trump's motivation for his claim, it's the right call.
Shortly after the election, Trump said that he would have won the popular vote — which he lost by nearly 3 million votes — if it weren't for "millions of illegal voters."
That sent the mainstream press into a fit of apoplexy, with journalist and left-wing activists denouncing Trump's claim as pure fabrication from a sore winner.
They went into another rage when Trump restated the claim in a meeting with lawmakers this week. The New York Times, which never called Obama out on his many abject lies, declared in its news pages that "Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers."
As we noted in this space before, there is evidence of ineligible voters casting ballots, citing studies that showed how outdated and slipshod voter registrations make it at least possible for noncitizens, and even illegal aliens, to vote. (A Pew Center study found that one out of every eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date or a duplicate.)
We pointed to 2014 study in the online Electoral Studies Journal which found, alarmingly, that "noncitizen votes likely gave 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."
The mainstream press has dismissed that study, pointing out that a Harvard Team found flaws in the methodology. But the Harvard team also declared that "the likely percent of noncitizen voters in recent U.S. elections is 0."
Whatever the flaws of the 2014 study, we know for a fact that the number of noncitizen voters is more than zero.
This week, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, who have both tracked voter fraud extensively, detailed multiple specific examples of noncitizens casting ballots in U.S. elections. Among them:
  • Election officials in a Kansas discovered that about a dozen newly sworn citizens had already voted in multiple elections when they offered to register them in 2015.
  • An investigation into a 1996 California House race in which Loretta Sanchez defeated incumbent Rep. Bob Dornan found 624 invalid votes by noncitizens in a race where Sanchez won by fewer than 1,000 votes.
  • A September report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation found more than 1,000 noncitizens on Virginia's voter rolls, many of whom had cast votes in previous elections.
  • A district-court administrator estimated that up to 3% of the 30,000 people called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period were not U.S. citizens.
These may seem like small potatoes. But as Fund and von Spakovsky point out, "we don't know how big of a problem voter fraud really is because no systematic effort has ever been made to investigate it."
That's a knowledge gap that needs to be filled in, and Democrats should eagerly embrace such an effort.
After all, they are the ones who keep insisting that we have to "count every vote" and "every vote counts." Well, every single vote cast by an ineligible voter cancels out one legitimate ballot, which means that any level of fraud should be intolerable.
Plus, if Trump is wrong about the scale of voter fraud, a thorough investigation is the only way to prove it.
Somehow, we doubt Democrats will see it this way.