A prominent New York Times columnist pulled no punches while discussing President Donald Trump’s main new pretense for election meddling, calling out the White House for harping on about “a fake problem made up by losers.”
In a recent edition of his “Takes” video series on YouTube, liberal NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie discussed the Trump administration’s recent attempt to target “noncitizen voters,” with a new demand that California purge names of suspected noncitizens from its ballot prior to the election. The state’s government hit back, claiming that there would be no way to inspect the voter rolls in time for Election Day, and that trying to do so would inevitably result in law-abiding voters getting purged by mistake.
Bouie argued that there was no merit to this line of attack from Trump, accusing the administration of merely trying to prop up an excuse to delegitimize the eventual results out of California after the midterms. More to the point, however, he also went scorched earth against the idea that noncitizen voting was anything close to a real problem, let alone one warranting a massive mobilization by the federal government.
“I think it’s actually very reasonable for someone who isn’t paying a ton of attention and doesn’t know a ton to assume that the U.S. has a problem with non-citizens voting in federal elections, but I’m here to tell you that that’s wrong. Just completely and totally wrong,” Bouie explained. “Over the last decade, any number of groups, organizations and the like have done detailed studies of non-citizen voting, trying to find out what is the actual amount of non-citizen voting that happens in the United States, and the consistent answer no matter who you ask is that there is effectively none. Statistically equivalent to zero.”
He continued: “I use those terms effectively and statistically zero because it’s important to remember that in any given election year there are tens of millions of votes being cast; in a presidential election year, those numbers are north of a hundred and fifty 160 million votes. And so when you have that many people voting in that many places, there is bound to be some instance of something, basically anything. The question is whether it’s prevalent, whether it’s common, whether it happens at a frequency high enough that would justify actions that might disenfranchise completely legal voters and the answer to that question is no; it doesn’t. It happens so infrequently that it’s effectively the same as it not happening at all.”
Bouie further cited a 2016 study from the Brennan Center for Justice, which found that out of around 23.5 million votes cast in 42 jurisdictions, only about 30 instances of non-citizen voting could be found, a percentage that of the total votes cast that was ultimately negligible, and far from a trend that could meaningfully shift a race.
“My odds right now of being struck by lightning three times in a row, higher than the rate of non-citizen voting, according to [the conservative Heritage Foundation’s] data,” Bouie added.