Samira wrote:
You don't believe that one study was legitimately debunked; that's fine, I can't make you believe it.
It's not just that it wasn't legitimately debunked, but that the attempt at debunking was so laughable as to be hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously. What on earth do you think will happen when you follow up with those survey respondents?
Quote:
But surely you must have more sources than that one?
Geez. I've forgotten which source is which. And yes, many of these are different groups analyzing the same dataset, so there's that. But
here's another one. I'm sure I could dig out some more, but again, it's the same dataset, so you'll get the same or similar results no matter how many times you analyze it. Which really is the point here. The data itself strongly supports the fact that illegal aliens are voting, and in numbers great enough to affect some election results. I ran into one blog/article/whatever that ran some numbers and determined that if less than 1% (I think it was like .6% IIRC) of illegal aliens in Minnesota had voted, based on said dataset showing that when illegals vote they vote 80% for Democrats, that percentage would be sufficient to have more than covered the difference in votes that gave Frankin the win on recount there, which gave the Dems the 60th vote in the Senate they needed, which in turn allowed the ACA to be passed (well, the initial Senate version, which later got reconciled with the House version when they lost a seat, but who needs details). Even relatively small numbers can be significant in our process.
The reality is that it's almost certain that a reasonable percentage of people here illegally are voting illegally. How high is "reasonable" is hard to say, but I'd hope we could agree that the number is certainly not zero, right? And it's certainly not like 12-15 million, right? Or whatever the current number of illegal aliens is these days. It's somewhere in between. And frankly, just looking at the methodologies of get out the vote organizations (and registration organizations) where they certainly don't seem to make much of an effort to exclude illegal aliens makes it likely that there are millions of people who are registered to vote who are illegal residents. The only question is what percentage of them vote.
Let's not forget that it's not like it's even universally agreed upon that they
shouldn't be allowed to vote. A
poll a year or two ago showed that 53% of Democrats believed that illegal aliens should be allowed to vote (as long as they were residents and paid taxes). To be fair, 21% of Republicans thought so too. The point here is that we're essentially arguing this as though the issue of illegals voting is a horrifying thing that should not be allowed under any circumstances, and therefore no one would allow it (because it's just too horrible to contemplate, right?). We're supposed to all be against it, and therefore conclude that no one would allow it, and everyone would take great steps to prevent it from happening. Um... Except that roughly 1/3rd of the entire sample surveyed believed that they should be allowed to vote. That's a large number.
It's unbelievably unlikely that with that large a number believing they should be allowed to vote, everyone is still working their hardest to make sure that none of them do. And we're all supposed to pretend that there's no motivation for them to do this. And if that's the percentage among the population as a whole, what is the percentage among the illegal population itself? Remember, we're basically not debating the ease with which someone here illegally could be registered to vote (since that's almost certainly a pretty high number). In a state like California, it's not only easy to do this, you'd actually have to expend some effort to *not* get registered to vote. So diligent are our registration drives (which magically seem to target low income black and hispanic neighborhoods far far more than anywhere else), that you'd have to steadfastly refuse to fill out forms that are more or less shoved in your face regularly. Someone here illegally and attempting to blend in and pretend to be a legal citizen is going to do what all the other citizens do. They'll sign the petitions and the registration forms. And when the ballot stuff comes in the mail, they'll read it. And when their bosses encourage them to take time off work to go out and vote (cause it's their right and he's darn well going to make sure he's not violating it), what are they going to do? Not go? Give the employer who has to be able to claim that he had no clue that employee X was an illegal, and had presented a bogus SSN and background for employment a reason to potentially get fined or jailed for violating the law?
Then add in the rhetoric during election time. The Spanish language channels are incredibly active with calls for "everyone" to vote, and are suspiciously absent in any mention that you have to be a citizen to do so. And they make a point of talking about how important voting is for immigrant issues. Again, it's hard to put a firm number on this, but it's quite believable that as many as a million illegals voted in this election, and quite possibly many more (heck, it's possible that it's more just in California). They're given every reason to do so, lots of pressure to do so, and more or less no penalty or risk if they do. There's a whole lot of people actively looking the other way on this issue to believe that the results aren't exactly what they want: Lots of illegal residents voting. Again, they
want them to vote. Why are we pretending that all of this effort is expended trying to set up a system where it's relatively safe and easy for illegals to vote, and then expend more effort encouraging them to do so, but that somehow none of them actually are?
Just seems incredibly unlikely. I see this somewhat like the whole "no one's doing elective late term abortions" claim by the Left. Everyone falls over themselves to insist that no one would take advantage of the loopholes in the law that could allow it, but when we finally investigate (over massive protest of course), we find out that's exactly what is happening and has been happening all along. Same deal here. Why wouldn't illegals be voting in large numbers? Our system has massive gaping holes that allow it. We kinda have to assume that a good number of people are, in fact, taking advantage of that fact.
Edited, Dec 14th 2016 6:35pm by gbaji