IF YOU'RE CERTAIN THAT THE GOP'S ELECTION FRAUD NARRATIVE IS FALSE, DON'T HEDGE

There's a story in The New York Times by Alexandra Berzon about the Republican argument that significant numbers of undocumented immigrants are voting in American elections, and voting exclusively Democratic. The piece is a mixed bag. The headline is good:

Republicans Seize on False Theories About Immigrant Voting

"False" is good. "False" is unambiguous. But here's the subhead:

Activists, party lawyers and state officials are mobilizing behind a crackdown on a supposed scourge of noncitizens’ casting ballots. Voting rights advocates say the effort is spreading misinformation.

"Supposed" is skeptical, but it's a retreat from "false." And then the two-sentence structure of the subhead suggests that there realy is room for disagreement.

A few paragraphs in, Berzon tells us:

There is no indication that noncitizens are voting in large numbers. And yet the notion that they will flood the polls — and vote overwhelmingly for Democrats — is animating a sprawling network of Republicans who mobilized around former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a rigged election in 2020 and are now preparing for the next one.

This is accurate as far as it goes -- but this framing, which is standard for the mainstream media, provides a huge opening for Republicans. Non-citizens aren't voting "in large numbers"? What does that mean? Does it mean they are voting in fairly significant numbers, but Democrats want us to let it slide because the numbers aren't "large"?

As one Times reader says in the comments:

The important phrase, routinely underplayed by both sides, is "in large numbers." The Right want us to believe that illegal voters turn out on election day in innumerable hordes, while the Left (as in this article) discount "large numbers" dismissively, as if small numbers were nothing to worry about. But US elections are almost always won by a razor thin minority. Even a couple of thousand votes either way can and does make all the difference. In such circumstances, even small numbers are a major concern.

But it's not true that "US elections are almost always won by a razor thin" margin. In 2022 House elections, the average margin of victory was 28.9 percentage points. In that year's Senate elections, it was 19.6 percentage points.

Yes, we've all been told that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because of close wins in several battleground states. But "close" meant a 10,457-vote margin of victory in Arizona, an 11,779-vote margin in Georgia, a 20,682-vote margin in Wisconsin, a 33,596-vote margin in Nevada, an 80,555-vote margin in Pennsylvania, and a 154,188-votes margin in Michigan. These margins go unmentioned in Berzon's story.

Now, how many votes by undocumented voters are there? Many, many paragraphs into the story, we're told this:

A recent analysis published by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, found that the number of votes cast by noncitizens discovered through state audits in 2016 ranged from three in Nevada, out of over a million votes cast, to 41 in North Carolina, where nearly five million votes were cast.

Many more paragraphs later, we're told:

One researcher, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights group, recently reviewed the Heritage Foundation’s data and found just 68 documented cases of noncitizens’ voting going back to the 1980s. And although the current frenzy is focused on undocumented immigrants, only a small fraction of those cases — just 10 — involved people living in the country illegally.

Voting by undocumented immigrants at this level couldn't possibly have tipped any of Biden's close states to Trump, even assuming that every undocumented voter voted for Biden. (It's an article of faith on the right that undocumented immigrants who manage to vote always vote Democratic, but this assertion is always presented without evidence.)

Yet although these numbers make it clear that Republicans who campaign against voting by undocumented immigrants are targeting a problem that barely exists, Berzon "balances" these statistics with Republican propaganda:

Republicans argue that even one illegal vote is too many and that the data is not capturing the scope of the potential problem given the millions of undocumented immigrants in the country.

What does "the potential problem" even mean in this context? Researchers have looked at the actual problem, and it's not a problem.

Cleta Mitchell, whose Election Integrity Network organized the July conference call of activists, said she believed that the “vast numbers of illegals” in the country represented a “huge threat to the integrity of our elections.”

But it clearly doesn't! Berzon's numbers make that clear.

“I’m sure you would agree that every illegal vote cancels a legal, citizen’s vote — so that even one such vote is a problem for democracy,” she said in an email to The Times.

Yes, it's a problem -- a tiny, tiny problem that's not affecting the outcome of elections.

And yet Republicans are given even more column inches to make their bad-faith case:

Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Public Interest Legal Foundation have tracked alleged instances of noncitizen voting, some of which turned out to be wrong. Even small numbers can decide tight elections, they say....

But number this small aren't deciding tight elections.

Readers who read to the end of the story will come away understanding how flimsy the GOP's evidence is:

In 2019, Texas’ secretary of state, David Whitley, claimed he had identified nearly 100,000 noncitizens on the rolls and demanded that many produce proof of citizenship. Subsequent lawsuits and examination by voting rights advocates showed that the review was based on faulty methodology: The list included many people who had once submitted immigration documents to obtain a state identification. But they had since become naturalized as citizens, making them lawful voters. Mr. Whitley resigned amid blowback from the episode.

The key point is that Republicans can't point to a single election in which there's documented evidence of voting for Democrats by non-citizens in sufficient numbers to change the electoral outcome, and that should be Berzon's lede. That should be the lede of every journalist who writes about this. The supporting evidence should be the vast discrepancy between the actual number of voter-fraud cases and the victory margins in the elections Republicans are challenging.

The evidence is all on one side. No responsible journalist should treat a GOP "fraud" crusader as in any way credible.