Illegal Voters

Here is a story to shake one's faith in the integrity of US elections.  On the one hand, it comes across as the ravings of a lunatic conspiracy theorist.  On the other hand, the government had demonstrated an almost limitless capacity for incompetence and for creating programs that exacerbate the very problems they were established to cure.  There have been several stories that have exposed fraudulent voting on the small scale and demonstrate that there is a problem that should be addressed.  However, this story proposes that as much as 4.3% of the votes in the 2008 presidential race were illegally cast.  Of course, Obama won by 10 million votes so even factoring out those 5.7 million votes leaves him the victor.  The offered 3.6 million illegal votes for 2012 put Obama on somewhat shakier ground but still the likely winner.  The proposed size of the illegal voting is gargantuan, far beyond what seems reasonable.  How could it possibly be this bad and yet widely unknown?  If it is this bad, one could understand that government would not want this level of incompetence to be publicized.  Still, the sniff test says this has to be crackpottery, especially since it plays into Trump's claim that he would have won the popular vote except for all the illegal votes.   But this comes from Harvard, a source not likely to intentionally feed a narrative mostly floated by Republicans.

 

The data for the Cooperative Congressional Election Study is available for download here.