El Presidente Trumpo tweeted about the Texas voter fraud announcement we covered yesterday:
58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID! @foxandfriends
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 27, 2019
So basically the Texas secretary of state posted a statement about voter registrations that depended on green cards and other forms of ID that don’t prove the voter is a citizen. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the voter is illegal or has illegally voted.
Here’s how the Texas Tribune explained it:
In an advisory released Friday afternoon, the office said it was flagging individuals who had provided the Texas Department of Public Safety with some form of documentation — including a work visa or a green card — that showed they were not a citizen when they were obtaining a driver’s license or an ID card. Among the individuals flagged, about 58,000 individuals cast a ballot in one or more elections from 1996 to 2018, the secretary of state’s office said.
It’s unclear exactly how many of those individuals are not actually U.S. citizens and whether that number will be available in the future. In its notice to counties, the secretary of state’s office said the names should be considered “WEAK” matches, using all capital letters for emphasis.
That means counties may now choose to investigate the eligibility of the individuals who were flagged, which would require them to send a notice asking for proof of citizenship within 30 days, or take no action. By law, the counties aren’t allowed to automatically revoke a voter’s registration without sending out such a notice.
And further, even if every single instance of questionable voting was an illegal vote, you’re talking about 5,000 votes per election year. Texas definitely needs to look into the irregularities, but we cannot conclude from their statement that there are tens of thousands of illegal votes, at least not yet anyway.
Trump also tweeted about the cost of illegal aliens in the U.S.:
We are not even into February and the cost of illegal immigration so far this year is $18,959,495,168. Cost Friday was $603,331,392. There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous! DHS
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 27, 2019
Again, I think some of these are exaggerated or paint an incomplete picture, but whatever the number is, it is very likely that illegals incur a cost to our social safety net that they do not pay back. And for that reason alone we need to have much much greater immigration enforcement…. and if we had a reasonable objective media, they would press the Democrats on why they’re so stalwartly against more enforcement.