Study: 10% to 27% of Non-Citizens Are Illegally Registered to Vote

 By James D. Agresti

Overview

Based on the latest available data and an enhanced version of a stress-tested methodology from a scholarly journal, a new study by Just Facts has found that about 10% to 27% of non-citizen adults in the U.S. are now illegally registered to vote.

The U.S. Census recorded more than 19 million adult non-citizens living in the U.S. during 2022. Given their voter registration rates, this means that about two million to five million of them are illegally registered to vote. These figures are potentially high enough to overturn the will of the American people in major elections, including congressional seats and the presidency.

Background

In 2014, the academic journal Electoral Studies published a groundbreaking study by three scholars who estimated how frequently non-citizens were illegally voting. Based on data for the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, the study found that:

• “roughly one quarter of non-citizens” in the U.S. “were likely registered to vote.”
• “6.4% of non-citizens actually voted.”
• 81.8% of them “reported voting for Barack Obama.”
• illegal votes cast by non-citizens “likely” changed “important election outcomes” in favor of Democrats, “including Electoral College votes” and a “pivotal” U.S. Senate race that enabled Democrats to pass Obamacare.

The study’s voter registration rate was estimated with data from two key sources:

1. A national survey in which 14.8% of non-citizens admitted that they were registered to vote.
2. A database of registered voters that reveals what portion of the surveyed non-citizens “were in fact registered” even though “they claimed not to be registered.”

By combining these data, the author’s “best” estimate was that 25.1% of non-citizens were illegally registered to vote.

The authors calculated voter turnout with the same datasets, but their methodology yielded a best estimate that 6.4% of non-citizens voted in 2008—lower than the 8.0% of non-citizens who stated “I definitely voted” and explicitly named the candidate they voted for. This and other matters led Just Facts to engage in extensive correspondence with the lead author of the study to verify practically every detail of it.

Just Facts then conducted a comparable study that used the same datasets, a more straightforward methodology, and related studies to constrain assumptions. This found that roughly 27% of non-citizens were registered to vote and about 16% of them voted in the 2008 national elections.

As is often the case with studies of illegal actions where enforcement is limited, both Just Facts’ study and the one from Electoral Studies have sizeable margins of uncertainty. This is due to relatively small sample sizes and other possible sources of error—some that could produce overcounts and others undercounts.

“Fact Checks”

So-called fact checkers and certain scholars have repeatedly tried to dispute the Electoral Studies paper and Just Facts’ study. However, their criticisms were mathematically illiterate and laced with unrealistic assumptions, empty arguments, half-truths, and outright falsehoods.

Now, the Washington Post’s lead “fact checker,” Glenn Kessler, claims to have uncovered new evidence that undercuts the results of the 2014 Electoral Studies paper and Just Facts’ research. This consists of a previously sealed “Expert Report” on non-citizen voting for a 2023 Arizona court case.

Notably, the report was written by the lead author of the Electoral Studies paper, Dr. Jesse Richman, an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Old Dominion University.

In an article titled “The Truth About Noncitizen Voting in Federal Elections,” Kessler quotes several figures from Richman’s 2023 report suggesting that about 1% of non-citizens are registered to vote. This is drastically below the “best” estimate of 25% from Richman’s 2014 paper.

The glaring disparity between the 2014 and 2023 figures prompted Just Facts to scrutinize the methodologies used to produce them. This research revealed that all of the 1% figures are lowball estimates. This was confirmed when Just Facts questioned Richman, who responded:

An important element of context for the Arizona report is that it was written as an expert report in a court case (and indeed it was a confidential part of the case until it got subpoenaed). In that context my focus was on identifying and explicating the evidence most robust to cross-examination. Thus, my goal was to explain to the court the results and the datasets where as many possible counter-arguments concerning how the estimate could be biased upwards were closed off. Of course, no choice about which analyses to focus on comes without tradeoffs. And the tradeoff from focus on analyses where one can minimize the risk that the estimate could be biased upwards is that there is potentially an increased risk that the estimate could be biased downwards.

Beyond portraying minimums as best estimates, Kessler also misleads his readers with a half-truth that the 2014 paper estimated “6.4 percent of noncitizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent voted in 2010.” What Kessler fails to reveal is that 2010 was a mid-term election, and Richman explained in Kessler’s newspaper that “these are the patterns one would expect to see if the measures retained validity and non-citizens were a group mobilized more in presidential election years than midterms.”

In another ruse, Kessler criticizes and links to a study by Just Facts while coyly describing it as the work of “one researcher.” This avoids the scholarly track record of the organization and the fact that two Ph.D.’s who specialize in data analytics vetted the study and described it as “methodologically sound,” “fair in its conclusions,” and “credible.”

Kessler also misreports the results of Just Facts’ study by claiming that it found non-citizens gave Biden “almost an additional 18,000 votes” in Arizona in 2020. In reality, the study plainly states that non-citizens gave Biden an “extra” “51,081 ± 17,689” votes in Arizona. This equals 33,000 to 69,000—not 18,000.

Ironically, Donald Trump was indicted by a D.C. grand jury for accurately citing the lower bound of those figures.

The Latest Data & Study

The redeeming element of Kessler’s article is that it alerted Just Facts to the existence of non-citizen voter registration data from 2022. This enabled Just Facts to update previous studies on this issue with the latest available information.

Using an enhanced version of the methodology that yielded the same “best” registration rate as the 2014 Electoral Studies paper, Just Facts’ new study finds that roughly 10% to 27% of non-citizen adults in the U.S. are now registered to vote.

The data and methodology of the study are detailed in this spreadsheet. Enhancements over previous studies include:

• a more precise formula to calculate sampling margins of error.
• the use of dual methodologies to account for varying possibilities.
• multiple citizenship questions in the survey that limit the possibility of honest mistakes by survey respondents.

As with other studies of illegal actions, there are uncertainties in the results. For example, the study assumes that all people who claim to be “citizens” in the survey actually are citizens. This is unlikely given that the journal Demographic Research published a study in 2013 which found that certain major groups of non-citizens often falsely claim to be citizens in Census surveys. If these dishonest survey respondents register to vote at higher or lower rates than other non-citizens, this could skew the results of the study.

Standards for high quality research require that assumptions be “explicit and justified” to provide “a fully ethical presentation of scientific data.” This standard has been brazenly and repeatedly flouted by scholars who downplay voting by non-citizens. In contrast, the assumptions and justifications of Just Facts’ study are provided here.

Potential Impacts

In presidential elections, roughly half of non-citizens who are registered turn out to vote. Given that about 10% to 27% of them are currently registered, this means about 5% to 13% of them will illegally vote in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections.

The U.S. Census recorded a population of 19.7 million voting-age non-citizens in the U.S. during 2022. This is an absolute minimum because the Census doesn’t count masses of non-citizens who falsely claim to be citizens or don’t fill out Census surveys.

Also, the figure of 19.7 million doesn’t include multitudes of non-citizens who’ve entered since 2022. This includes people who legally immigrated, crossed the border illegally, or were allowed into the country under the Biden administration’s parole policies.

Based on the data above, roughly 1.0 million to 2.7 million non-citizens will illegally vote in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections unless stronger election integrity measures are implemented.

Closing the Loopholes

To prevent illegal voting by non-citizens, Congressional Republicans recently introduced a 22-page bill to “require proof of United States citizenship” to register to vote in federal elections.

While reporting on a press conference announcing the legislation, media outlets like the Associated Press, CNN, NBC News, Rolling Stone, and NPR attacked the bill as unnecessary. NPR, for instance, reported that “it’s already illegal” for non-citizens to vote in federal elections and “there’s never been evidence to support the idea noncitizens are voting at anything other than miniscule numbers.”

Those claims—which echo the Biden administration’s statement on this matter—are refuted by the Electoral Studies paper, Just Facts’ research, and the following facts that prove there are wide openings for non-citizens to vote.

Open Doors to Illegal Voting

All 50 states require people to be U.S. citizens in order to register to vote in federal elections, and federal law forbids non-citizens from falsely claiming citizenship to register to vote. However, enforcement mechanisms for such laws are limited, and opportunities to get around them are ample.

For a prime example, federal law requires all states to register voters for federal elections via a form developed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The form requires people to declare that they are U.S. citizens, but it doesn’t require them to prove it.

Several states, including Arizona and Georgia, tried to require people who register with the federal form to provide “documentary evidence” of citizenship, but they were blocked by court rulings supported by the Obama administration.

So instead of proof of citizenship, the federal form allows people to register and vote with assorted forms of “identification” like a “utility bill” or “bank statement.”

The federal form also has state-specific instructions which are rife with loopholes that could allow non-citizens to register. The instructions for New Jersey are typical of most states:

The last four digits of your Social Security number OR your New Jersey Driver’s License number is required for voter registration. If you do not possess either of these identifications, please write “NONE” on the form. The State will assign a number that will serve to identify you for voter registration purposes.

Likewise, the NJ State form—which provides another avenue to register for federal elections—contains a checkbox that allows people to register without a Social Security or driver’s license number if they “provide a COPY of a current and valid photo ID, or a document with your name and current address on it.” This can be anything from a “store membership ID” or “student ID” to a “rent receipt” or “government check.”

Ignoring those facts, the New York Times recently criticized Elon Musk for saying that illegal immigrants “are not prevented from voting in federal elections” and “you don’t need government issued ID to vote.”

The Times claimed that Musk was wrong because “federal law requires identification verification from voters when they register.” That hyperlink leads to a document by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice which claims that “new identification requirements” in a 2002 federal voting law “may severely threaten voters’ rights….”

What the Times fails to reveal is that the Brennan Center describes the identification requirements in the law, which don’t require government-issued ID or proof of citizenship—just as Musk wrote. The Center even notes that a “utility bill” or “bank statement” is enough to comply with the law. The text of the 2002 legislation and the current U.S. election code law confirm this.

The lack of enforcement against illegal voting by non-citizens was aptly summarized by Barack Obama shortly before the 2016 U.S. presidential election when actress Gina Rodriguez asked him if “Dreamers” and “undocumented citizens” would be deported if they voted. Obama replied:

Not true. And the reason is, first of all, when you vote, you are a citizen yourself. And there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over, and people start investigating, etcetera.

After dodging the fact that Dreamers and other unauthorized immigrants are not citizens, Obama’s clear message was that there is no effective way to enforce the law that prohibits them from voting.

Republicans are proposing to fix that situation, while Democrats and the media are telling people it doesn’t exist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Identity Fraud

Even if the federal government or states adopted a law that requires official government IDs or Social Security numbers for voter registration, this wouldn’t constitute proof of citizenship because identity fraud is rampant among non-citizens.

For a prime example, the chief actuary of the U.S. Social Security Administration estimated in 2013 that:

• 0.7 million illegal immigrants worked in 2010 by using Social Security numbers obtained by using “fraudulent birth certificates.”
• another 1.8 million illegal immigrants worked in 2010 by using Social Security numbers “that did not match their name.”

Likewise, a 2002 investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that “the use of fraudulent documents by aliens is extensive.” For instance, immigration officials in Los Angeles “seized nearly two million counterfeit documents” in November 1998, including “permanent resident cards and Social Security cards, which were headed for distribution points around the country.”

Similarly, the New York Times reported in 2005, “Currently available for about $150 on street corners in just about any immigrant neighborhood in California, a typical fake ID package includes a green card and a Social Security card.”

Perhaps most revealingly, California Senate Leader and Democrat Kevin De Leon publicly stated in 2017:

I can tell you half of my family would be eligible for deportation under [Trump’s] executive order, because if they got a false Social Security card, if they got a false identification, if they got a false driver’s license … if they got a false green card. And anyone who has family members who are undocumented knows that almost entirely everybody has secured some sort of false identification.

Hiding the Data

In 2017, President Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity asked the states for “detailed, publicly available voter-roll data” that could be cross-checked against other databases with information on citizenship status. However, states refused to turn over the data and filed a flurry of lawsuits to stop the commission.

In the words of California’s Secretary of State:

While the commission is allowed to request the personal data of California voters, they cannot compel me to provide it. Let me reassure California voters: I will not provide the Commission with any personal voter data. …

 

Yesterday’s ruling is merely the first in a string of lawsuits challenging the Commission. Those lawsuits send a strong message—the Commission will face opposition at every step of the way from those who are fighting to protect our voting rights, our privacy, and our democratic principles.

Note that California claims the commission asked for “personal data,” but in reality, the commission explicitly requested “publicly available voter-roll data.” California’s deceptive refusal of this request and the ample openings for non-citizens to vote take on added significance in the light of this next topic.

Who Do Non-Citizens Vote For?

In the 2008 presidential election, 82% of non-citizens who admitted that they voted stated that they voted for Democrat Barack Obama, while only 18% said they voted for Republican John McCain. Showing this was not a fluke, Richman found in multiple surveys conducted from 2006 to 2022 that 73% to 82% of non-citizens supported Democratic candidates.

Those outcomes accord with the promises and actions of Democrat politicians to give wide-ranging welfare and full amnesty to people who immigrate to the United States legally or illegally. The implications of this are further highlighted by facts like the following:

• A nationally representative bilingual survey of 784 immigrant Latinos conducted by Pew Research in 2011 found that 81% said they would prefer “a bigger government providing more services,” and 12% said they would prefer “a smaller government with fewer services.” In stark contrast, 41% of the general U.S. population said they would prefer a bigger government, and 48% said they want a smaller one.

• Surveys conducted by YouGov in 2008 and 2012 found that 60% to 71% of non-citizens identified as Democrats, while only 16% to 17% identified as Republicans.

• A nationally representative bilingual survey of 800 Hispanic adults conducted by McLaughlin & Associates in 2013 found that 59% were born outside the U.S., 53% considered themselves to be Democrats, and 12% considered themselves to be Republicans.

Conclusion

Every illegal vote cast by a non-citizen nullifies the legal vote of a citizen, thereby subverting their Constitutional right to vote.

A wealth of data and corroborating facts show that:

• non-citizens have ample openings to illegally vote.
• roughly 10% to 27% of them are registered to vote.
• about 5% to 13% of them vote in presidential elections.
• the vast bulk of them vote for Democrats.

Given the estimates above and the fact that more than 20 million non-citizen adults live in the U.S., roughly 1.0 million to 2.7 million of them will illegally vote in 2024 unless stronger election integrity measures are implemented. This could easily overturn the will of the American people in close major elections.

Instead of reporting these facts or mitigating this threat to every citizen’s right to vote, “fact checkers,” major media outlets, and elected Democrats are denying this problem exists.

https://www.justfacts.com/news_non-citizen_voter_registration

Most harmful misinformation now circulating

 “Misinformation” — It has been one of the most-used buzzwords of the past few years. The “misinformation” label has been applied by advocates on both sides of the political divide in the attempt to discredit their opponents. Numerous assertions that have dominated the news cycle for months or even years have ultimately proven to be completely false, that is, “misinformation.” Examples of such assertions that have been established as “misinformation” include the assertion that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election; the assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian plant; and the assertion that the Covid virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan.

After the thorough discrediting of so many false narratives during these years, there remain plenty of narratives still out there that richly deserve the “misinformation” label. But of those, which is the very worst, the very most pernicious? Here is my candidate: the assertion that the cheapest way to generate electricity today is with wind and solar generators.

I recognize that there are many candidates for the title of the worst of all misinformation, and we are dealing here with a very crowded field. Numerous other endlessly-repeated false assertions contend for the title, many of them having very large real-world consequences. For example, other serious contenders for the title of “most pernicious misinformation” could include the assertion that emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases constitute a danger to human health and welfare; or the assertion that Israel is conducting a “genocide” against Palestinians. Undoubtedly, you have other candidates to add to the list.

So why do I say that the assertion of wind and solar being the cheapest ways to generate electricity is the very most pernicious of misinformation currently out there? Here are my three reasons: (1) the assertion is repeated endlessly and ubiquitously, (2) it is the basis for the misallocation of trillions of dollars of resources and for great impoverishment of billions of people around the world, and (3) it is false to the point of being preposterous, an insult to everyone’s intelligence, yet rarely challenged.

How ubiquitous is the assertion that wind and solar are the cheapest ways to generate electricity? Try Googling the question “What is the cheapest way to produce electricity?” You will get multiple pages of results advocating for wind and solar electricity, with almost no mention of the problems or costs of intermittency. A few examples of what turns up:

• The top result from Galooli.com, March 13, 2022, “Which Renewable Energy is Cheapest? A Guide to Cost and Efficiency”: “According to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook and other research projects, solar and wind energy have continued to occupy the top spots in terms of the cheapest renewable energy sources. Both energy sources cost significantly less than fossil fuel alternatives and continue to become more affordable every year.”

• Next up, decarbonization.com, August 2, 2023, “Ranked: The Cheapest Sources of Electricity in the U.S.”: “According to Lazard’s 2023 analysis of unsubsidized LCOE in the U.S., both onshore wind and utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies are more cost-effective than combined cycle natural gas power plants. In the case of onshore wind, this has been true since 2015.”

• Next, carbonbrief.com, October 13, 2020, “Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA.”: “The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries. That is according to the International Energy Agency. . . .”

Keep going for dozens of these for page after page. Try to find in any of them a serious discussion of the costs of backup, storage, or transmission upgrades to try to make an electrical grid work with these intermittent generators. You won’t. And don’t think that the high-brow mainstream sources can be trusted for anything better. Here is the New York Times from August 17, 2023: “The cost of generating electricity from the sun and wind is falling fast and in many areas is now cheaper than gas, oil or coal.”

In the face of hundreds of different journalism outlets endlessly repeating in unison the mantra of cheap “renewable” electricity, it becomes difficult to blame the voters or the politicians for just nodding along with the crowd. Why do any mentally taxing independent thinking when everybody seems to be saying the same thing?

The problem is that the idea that wind and solar make the cheapest electricity is plain wrong. At least, it is plain wrong if the electricity you are talking about is the reliable sort that works whenever you want to turn on the switch. The idea that wind and solar are cheapest fails to take account of any of the ancillary costs necessary to make a fully-functioning grid: the entire system of backup facilities to provide the power when the wind is not blowing and the sun not shining; the transmission facilities to take the power from wherever is windy or sunny to anywhere else it may be needed on a moment’s notice; the batteries or other storage facilities to save up energy in anticipation of inevitable wind and solar droughts; and so forth. In short, the idea that wind and solar generation of electricity are the “cheapest” is classic misinformation, the endless repetition of an assertion that is clearly false and known to be false.

Meanwhile, among the people incapable of seeing through the fog of misinformation on this subject are our current President, and the Governors of New York and California. In the case of the states, they throw tens of billions of dollars of handouts and subsidies to develop wind and solar facilities (hundreds of billions of dollars in the case of the feds), never having the presence of mind to realize that none of that would be necessary of this method of generation were actually cheaper as claimed.

Between the vast mis-allocation of resources and the sheer preposterousness of the proposition in question, I think that this assertion of wind and solar electricity generation being “cheapest” definitely has the claim for the number one spot.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-5-17-what-is-the-most-pernicious-example-of-misinformation-currently-circulating

The Biden Administration’s Scientific Integrity Policies

 It is no secret that the Biden administration has prioritized insulating the administrative state from the will of the people. The goal is placing career officials on equal footing with agency leadership (i.e., political appointees). Undoing Schedule F, which would categorize federal employees with policymaking authority so as to not give them the same civil service protections as career employees, is a more high-profile example. But a lesser-known effort, detailed in a recent Council to Modernize Governance publication, is underway with scientific integrity policies.

Scientific integrity policies are not new. They were first developed in the late 1990s and focused science without predetermined outcomes informing policy decisions. They also required agencies to represent findings fairly and accurately. The Obama administration added that scientific integrity includes open discussion and firm commitment to the evidence. Clearly, this is good policy.

However, the Biden administration has quietly added new components to these scientific integrity policies. It issued an executive order directing agencies to curb “political considerations” or “improper influence” in science, which is clever rhetoric that hides the true intent.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was the first to issue this policy change, stating scientific findings “must not be suppressed, delayed, or altered for political purposes….” The policy, which applies to agency leadership (i.e., officials appointed by a president), prohibits “interference” in the “design, proposal, conduct, management, [and] evaluation” of studies. Yet it requires scientists to be included in policy decisions. Indeed, prohibiting the “design” of a study or the action of even “proposing” one –a critical step for many efforts – effectively boxes out those running federal agencies from their own agency’s direction.

The policy creates an avenue for employees to report one another should they perceive said “improper influence.” But these types of rights already exist in the form of Inspector General or EEOC complaints and are unnecessary. But this reporting protocol would likely have a bottom-up effect, where a subordinate employee would hold a trump card over a superior. Encouraging employees to report one another for outside-the-box thoughts hardly fosters ingenuity (or a cohesive work environment).

The policies themselves also appear to undermine, rather than protect, scientific integrity. For instance, the administration’s mandating of equal treatment for “indigenous knowledge” is worrisome. Science should be objective, rigorous, and subject to peer-review and replication. Indigenous knowledge offers us none of these characteristics, as it is based upon tradition. And which indigenous voices will get priority? For example, the Department of the Interior recently relied upon one version of indigenous knowledge to oppose energy development in ANWR over the indigenous knowledge of local Alaska tribes who favor such development. Situations like this prove the value of objective science guiding policy decisions.

Identity politics is another suspect priority. Strangely, the policies go out of their way to require inclusivity “of all scientists,” which is followed by diversity, equity, and inclusion language. One’s sex, race, sexual orientation, etc. seemingly has little bearing on objective evidence.

Many agencies, including the EPA and the Department of Health and Human Services have implemented similar changes. EPA leadership is currently negotiating with the agency workers’ union to embed these policy changes within the collective bargaining agreement. This means that the government is headed toward a binding contract between it and the union, which can be harder to undue than a simple regulation.

The dangers are clear. Consistent with repealing Schedule F, the idea appears designed to prevent career employees from having to answer to agency leadership appointed by future administrations. Given that agency leaders are ultimately the only people within an agency who are subject to the will of the people (elections), the effort is hardly democratic.

It is likely illegal too. These policy changes are effectively a disguised effort to protect certain policy preferences during future administrations by propping up employees who have never been appointed. But the Appointments Clause gives the President alone the authority to appoint officers of the United States. An officer of the United States is one who “exercise[es] significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States.” Handing a portion of this authority to employees and greatly limiting their respective constitutional officers’ review effectively makes those career employees unappointed officers of the United States. This is in direct opposition to the design of our Founding Fathers.

A future administration should act immediately to restore the well-intentioned scientific integrity policies from prior administrations. The American public deserves, and the Constitution requires, federal agency leaders who are empowered to make informed decisions and be accountable to the people. This cannot occur in an environment where decisions are dictated by subordinates with pre-determined outcomes.

Curtis Schube is the Executive Director for Council to Modernize Governance, a think tank committed to making the administration of government more efficient, representative, and restrained. He is formerly a constitutional and administrative law attorney.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2024/05/18/the_biden_administrations_scientific_integrity_policies_1032471.html

THE TIMES THREATENS THE SUPREME COURT

 The New York Times believes that by right, it should have the Supreme Court in its pocket–as, to be fair, it did for quite a few years. So it is doing all it can to discredit the Court’s new conservative majority. It has directed its attacks mostly toward Justice Clarence Thomas, against whom the Times has levied baseless charges of ethics violations.

Yesterday the Times went after Justice Samuel Alito, probably the Court’s most conservative member. For what? “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.”

Well, that is pretty inflammatory! What is the story? It begins with the paper’s usual mis-recitation of history:

After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office….

It’s a news story, just reciting the facts.

…many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.

As the Times grudgingly admits many paragraphs later, the upside-down flag is a longstanding distress signal, predating the 2020 election by many years. So what is the point?

One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.

Aha! It all has to do with the January 6 protest, a relatively mild one by recent standards, with which the Times and its allies are weirdly obsessed:

The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before.

There you have it. The paper apparently reached out to Justice Alito for comment, but you have to read deep into the story to see it:

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Reading between the lines, we learn that the Alitos live in a deeply divided neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia. Among other things, they have been subjected to demonstrations on their lawn. I take it that Mrs. Alito may have had enough. I have never met Mrs. Alito, but I am pretty sure I would like her.

So what’s the point?

Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.

“Judicial experts” = leftists in the Times reporters’ rolodexes. The Times is concerned about the case now before the Court, relating to the scope of then-President Trump’s immunity as it relates to the January 6 protests. Which admittedly got out of hand, but to nowhere near the extent of, say, the George Floyd riots, which the Democrats encouraged, or the Democratic Party’s six-month illegal occupation of Wisconsin’s state capitol. So the paper is trying to put the squeeze on Justice Alito.

Its alleged “ethics” concerns are of course a joke. But the paper isn’t giving up, and it is trying to keep the pressure on Justice Thomas, too:

This spring, the justices are already laboring under suspicion by many Americans…

Actually, just NYT readers, who are not very numerous.

…that whatever decisions they make about the Jan. 6 cases will be partisan. Justice Clarence Thomas has declined to recuse himself despite the direct involvement of his wife, Virginia Thomas, in efforts to overturn the election.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with trying to overturn an election, as Al Gore can tell you. Or Al Franken, who did it successfully. Democrats are all for overturning elections, as long as they are the ones doing the overturning. And it is an article of faith among Democrats that one spouse’s actions can’t be attributed to the other, even in cases of obvious corruption involving joint checking accounts.

Can the New York Times actually influence Supreme Court justices like Thomas and Alito to change their votes to favor the Democratic Party? No. I think they have two goals: 1) to keep their left-wing base riled up, and 2) to drag down the reputation and influence of the Supreme Court, to the extent they are able to do so. Of course, this is the opposite of their policy when the Democrats controlled the Court. Then, they viewed the Court as a hallowed institution.

But that was then, and this is now.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/05/the-times-threatens-the-supreme-court.php

Genocidal, But Mostly Peaceful

 After months of anti-Israel protests on college campuses across the United States—some of which ended in law-enforcement interventions, destruction of property, arrests, and canceled commencements—mainstream media are still confused, or misguided, or worse, when it comes to covering the story.

Two approaches have emerged, both illustrative of broader failings in the profession. The first embraces and romanticizes the protests as part of a long and admirable trend of student activism, often tapping into highly selective memories of 1960s-era youth culture. The second approach also views the protests as positive, in a way that allows journalists to ignore and minimize the violent and anti-Semitic words and deeds of many of those in encampments and on quads. Just as many journalists offered a falsified portrait of the George Floyd Summer protests of 2020—as captured by the infamous CNN chyron, “Fiery but mostly peaceful,” that ran live under images of protesters setting fire to buildings—the tone of many reports this spring might be described as “Genocidal, but mostly peaceful.”

American journalists learned over the past decade to redefine violence as speech (“mostly peaceful” arson) and speech as violence (Tom Cotton’s “unsafe” op-ed about calling in the National Guard). Now acceptable protest has been expanded to include . . . just about anything, including the occupation of buildings and destruction of property. “People understand that ‘occupying buildings on campus’ is, like, one of the most common forms of student protest for decades and not some devious new ploy devised by professional anarchist plotters, right?” said Chris Hayes of MSNBC. He went on to argue, bizarrely, that “college activism has long been part of a college education,” as if trespassing and barricading and holding janitors hostage is akin to Freshman Comp.

The Washington Post also made a serious effort to downplay the radicalism of the protesters by portraying them as victims of a right-wing vendetta. “They Criticized Israel. This Twitter Account Upended Their Lives,” read a typical headline. In the story, Pranshu Verma described the social-media account StopAntisemitism as a group that “has flagged hundreds of people who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza” and, as a result, lost their jobs. As Jill Filipovic noted in the Atlantic, however, “that’s not actually an accurate description of the reality that the Post is reporting.” One of the women who was fired had said “radical solidarity with Palestine means . . . not apologizing for Hamas,” while another was filmed tearing down hostage posters and claiming that the hostages were being held not by Hamas but by Israel. Still another, whom the Post described as calling Israelis “pigs,” in fact said: “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement,” adding, “May they rot in hell.” These are people who—as their employers rationally came to understand—were not colleagues with whom others might be comfortable working.

Many journalists clearly sympathize with the protesters and believe that their forms of expression are within the range of acceptable resistance. But their efforts to downplay the radical stances of the protesters would be comical if it wasn’t also so clearly a violation of the journalistic norms we are constantly informed are so crucial to a healthy democracy and supposedly under threat only from the bad guys on the other side of the aisle.

Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times described the often-violent words of protesters in her newsletter and on the paper’s Matter of Opinion podcast as follows: “They are peaceful if boisterous expressions of moral outrage” by “a bunch of kids hanging out, chanting various slogans, none of which seemed particularly outré to me.” Her colleague Michelle Cottle agreed, pooh-poohing the idea that the protesters promoted anti-Semitism. “I don’t think this is a question that you can ultimately solve in some kind of objective way,” she said. “There’s not a kind of anti-Semitism detector that’s just going to ding and tell you, yes, this is anti-Semitic, therefore, it’s out of bounds. Or no, it’s not, therefore, it’s OK. All of these things are in the eye of the beholder.” Indeed, two Harvard professors, writing in the explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish Currents, invoked Gramsci to argue that claims of anti-Semitism were false and evidence of a “moral panic.”

Oh? Columbia University undergraduate Khymani James was one of the leaders of the protests on that campus. He posted a video of himself taken during a disciplinary hearing back in January saying it’s fine to kill people with whom he disagrees. “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” he said. Nor was this James’s first turn in the spotlight. He received a glowing profile from the Boston Globe in 2021 while still a high-school student. The puff piece showed James in a Black Lives Matter T-shirt with the headline, “‘Speak Your Truth’: How One Student Leader’s Confrontational Approach Reflects Generational Shift in Fighting Injustice.” In the course of the piece, he is quoted saying, simply, “Of course I hate white people.”

It is no “moral panic” to report that Students for Justice in Palestine, the major student group on campus behind these protests, praised Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel as a “historic win” against “the Zionist enemy,” or that students at protests on elite campuses such as Yale and Princeton and Stanford have proudly displayed Hamas and Hezbollah flags and other terrorist regalia. Nor to note, as the Anti-Defamation League reported and many social-media accounts confirmed, that a Columbia protestor said, “Never forget the 7th of October . . . the 7th of October is about to be every f—king day for you. You ready?” If Michelle Cottle thinks judgments of such actions are “in the eye of the beholder,” her eye does not know how to behold.

What this soft-pedaling of the horrors being spewed on campus has produced is a disastrously incurious media. Consider the question of how the college protests are organized and funded. The encampments that mysteriously sprang up like mushrooms on campuses in a matter of days across the country, with matching Coleman tents, were funded by big-name Democratic donors with last names like Rockefeller, Pritzker, and Soros. A Politico piece declared it “surprising” that “Biden’s biggest donors” are backing the protesters. “Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change.”

Politico’s article came out months after the protests began. It is a telling example of mainstream media’s ideological monoculture that journalists who delayed even asking such questions then found themselves surprised that left-wing dark money was funding radical protests on campus.

This willful blindness to the beliefs of the protesters they are covering also poses a challenge when trying to describe them. Some outlets, like the Associated Press, describe student activists as “antiwar protesters.” Others refer to them as “pro-Palestinian,” when the correct description would be “anti-Israel” and, in many cases, simply anti-Semitic. Not surprisingly, such reporters also end up uncritically repeating Hamas propaganda. The Post quoted a Barnard student who had been arrested for participating in Columbia’s encampment. “There’s these big mainstream media outlets that are making it breaking news that Columbia canceled in-person classes, but not breaking news that mass graves were discovered in Gaza,” she proclaimed. The Post reporter felt no need to mention that the claim about mass graves had been thoroughly debunked. Perhaps the reporter didn’t know. Perhaps her editor didn’t know. Perhaps no one at the paper knew. Perhaps they chose not to know.

Or perhaps they knew, and they wanted the lie to stand unmolested.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/anti-israel-protests-genocidal-genocidal-but-mostly-peaceful/

‘Zuckbucks’ Group Trains Election Offices On How To Put ‘Bidenbucks’ To Use

 Left-wing organization responsible for interfering in the 2020 contest to the benefit of Democrats hosted a training on Thursday instructing election offices on how to take advantage of President Biden’s federal intervention in state election administration.

Hosted by the Election Infrastructure Initiative, the webinar lectured college and local election officials on how best to utilize a program announced earlier this year by the Education Department that allows Federal Work-Study grants — which are used to provide part-time campus jobs to help students with tuition costs — to employ students for election-related work. This includes activities such as “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration, providing voter assistance at a polling place or through a voter hotline, or serving as a poll worker.”

The agency launched the program as a means of complying with Executive Order 14019, a directive signed by Biden in March 2021 ordering hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration by using taxpayer dollars to engage in voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities.

While the webinar was marketed as “nonpartisan,” the Election Infrastructure Initiative is anything but. According to InfluenceWatch, the initiative is a joint venture of the left-wing Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and Center for Secure and Modern Elections that “seeks to help congressional Democrats pass a proposed infrastructure bill, including sweeping changes to the elections process.”

CTCL is well-known for siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg into local election offices in the 2020 election. Colloquially referred to as “Zuckbucks,” these funds were used to alter how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsupervised protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes. To make matters worse, the grants were heavily skewed towards Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.

The Training

Thursday’s webinar was primarily led by Dan Meuse, a faculty member at Princeton University and fellow with the Institute for Responsive Government, which is a think tank sponsored by the left-wing New Venture Fund. Meuse’s LinkedIn profile indicates he previously worked for the office of former Rhode Island Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts, a Democrat.

Meuse advised local and state election officials on the “benefits” of employing Federal Work Study (FWS) students, which he claimed will help these officials “enhance [their] operations.”

“We know that election agencies are already thinking about hiring or have already started hiring … for the election season that’s coming up this fall,” Meuse said. “There are opportunities here to create for Federal Work-Study students and for your agency.”

Screenshot from Webinar Presentation.

Meuse also provided attendees with examples of potential roles for FWS students hired by election offices, including that of a junior customer service assistant. Key responsibilities for the role listed in an accompanying PowerPoint included “greet[ing] visitors and provid[ing] them with nonpartisan election information” and “provid[ing] clerical assistance in peak times, such as filing, tracking equipment, and supporting data entry.”

Other potential jobs Meuse suggested included junior election technician assistant and junior voter services associate, the latter of which is tasked with “support[ing] election processes by assisting voters in completing and submitting relevant forms” and “ensur[ing] confidentiality and security of all election materials.”

Screenshot from Webinar Presentation.

Meuse additionally advised attendees on potential hiring timelines for onboarding FWS students to work in election offices, how best to schedule students to work these jobs, and compensation guidelines.

‘Zuckbucks’ Meets ‘Bidenbucks’

To this day, the meddling in the 2020 election by private actors to boost Biden and Democrats represents an unprecedented level of interference in our elections system. But the “Bidenbucks” scheme that left-wing groups like CTCL and others are helping election offices implement is “Zuckbucks” on steroids.

The Education Department’s reimagined FWS guidance was issued in compliance with Executive Order 14019. In addition to forcing federal agencies to increase their voter registration and GOTV activities — which Congress never authorized — the directive required these departments to draft “strategic plan[s]” explaining how they intended to fulfill the order and collaborate with so-called “nonpartisan third-party organizations” approved by the White House to supply “voter registration services on agency premises.”

Contrary to the administration’s claims, these “nonpartisan” groups are unsurprisingly left-wing. Among those identified by good government groups and conservative media as collaborating with agencies on taxpayer-funded GOTV efforts are the ACLU and Demos, the latter of which drafted Executive Order 14019 before Biden took office, according to The Daily Signal.

The Education Department’s FWS guidance appears even more partisan when considering that college students are more likely to support Democrat candidates over Republican ones. During the 2022 midterms, for example, young voters (age 18-29) broke for Democrat House candidates over Republican ones by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, according to estimates by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

Democrat election officials in battleground states such as Arizona and Nevada have recently adopted the Biden administration’s approach of using taxpayer dollars to expand voter outreach to college students.

What’s evident is that Democrats will not stop in their efforts to interfere in elections and unfairly boost their candidates’ electoral prospects. Only now, they’re using your tax dollars to do it.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/17/zuckbucks-group-trains-election-offices-on-how-to-put-bidenbucks-to-use/