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October 24, 2014
Study: "Non-Citizens'" Illegal VotingIs More Than Enough to Swing Close Elections; May Have Provided Obama With His 60th Vote for Obamacare in 2009
Via Jim Geraghty, the preview of this soon-to-be-published racist study is published by... the Washington Post's "Monkey Cage."
In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.
...
Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given 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. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
Regarding the headline, note that the Senate passed in 2009 the version of Obamacare that the House would also vote on in 2010.
Obamacare was not passed until 2010, but the necessary Senate vote happened in 2009.