PolitiFact’s Brandon Mulder calls Sen. Cruz ‘liar’ with almost no Evidence
- Theoretical rules are all Mulder can use to deny Cruz’ claim
- Politifact claims automatic voting registration wouldn’t allow illegal aliens to vote
- Sen. Cruz raises legitimate concerns which Mulder ignores, Mulder uses inconvenient evidence and simple human psychology to rate claim ‘false’
OUR RATING: #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
Indicted Outlet: Brandon Mulder | PolitiFact | Link | Archive
“For the People Act”, or S1, is a voting bill backed by Senate Democrats that seeks to expand voter registration and voting access [1]. Ted Cruz has argued the voting bill “would register millions of illegal aliens to vote. It is intended to do that.” Mulder claims this is “pants on fire” false: “the bill does nothin
g to alter the legal requirement that only citizens are allowed to register to vote.” Using faulty logic and insufficient evidence, Mulder attempts to downplay the likelihood of fraud and delegitimize this issue.
Major Violations:
- Unbalanced
- Missing Context
- Willfully Ignorant
- Superficial Investigation
Sen. Ted Cruz bases his claim on the provision in the bill for automatic voter registration. According to Mulder the provision is only meant to streamline voting processes:
“The policy would require state agencies to share information collected on individuals with election officials to help streamline voter registration processes. A person interacting with one government office — like the department of motor vehicles or a public assistance agency — would have their information forwarded to election officials for registration purposes.”
The problem, according to Cruz’s spokesperson, is that there is no proof-of-citizenship required to register. Mulder admits this is true: “It’s true that the bill doesn’t add a proof-of-citizenship step to the registration process,” but then goes on to cite an “expert,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research,” who claims this won’t be a problem.
It’s important to note that the Center for Election Innovation and Research, though it is listed as a nonpartisan organization, received $50 million in funding from Mark Zuckerburg [3]. Zuckerberg is a hardcore leftist whose interests in “voter integrity” have led to suspicion that he seeks to engineer elections [4] [5]. Becker is clearly not an unbiased expert.
Preventing illegal aliens from voting across the U.S. has been a problem for decades. In 2011, CIS writes about fraud in Colorado:
“In Colorado, 11,805 discrepancies were discovered between individuals who presented proof of alienage when applying for driver’s licenses, but who later registered to vote” [6].
According to the Heritage Foundation:
In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration rolls over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens [7].
Furthermore, data concerning the issue is hard to find and often withheld for fear of the results being too overwhelming. The Heritage Foundation reports:
“In 1997, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Dallas were investigating voting by non-citizens. They sent a computerized tape of the names of individuals who had voted to the INS requesting a check against INS records, but the INS refused to cooperate with the criminal investigation. An INS official was quoted as saying that the INS bureaucracy did not ‘want to open a Pandora’s Box…. If word got out that this is a substantial problem, it could tie up all sorts of manpower. There might be a few thousand [illegal voters] in Dallas, for example, but there could be tens of thousands in places like New York, Chicago or Miami…In 2005, Sam Reed, the Secretary of State of Washington, asked the CIS to check the immigration status of registered voters in Washington; the agency refused to cooperate” [8] [9].
Mulder mentions several cases in which glitches in the system allowed for illegal aliens to register to vote. However, he dismisses these fears of voter fraud on the basis of expert opinion that these issues were “rare and easily detectable and fixable” because they were made by a computer. This isn’t exactly hard and fast evidence that something like this will never happen again.
It is clear and explicit that only U.S. citizens can vote in U.S. elections, but history has shown that in the past few decades the ability of law enforcement to enforce this law has come into question.
The second piece of evidence Mulder uses is both superficial and ignores human error and the failures in accountability that can and do occur much of the time. Here is the theoretical reason illegal aliens couldn’t register to vote, according to Mulder:
“…the absence of that requirement doesn’t mean “millions of illegal aliens” will begin registering, experts say. If a state agency doesn’t know a person’s citizenship status when referring their information to election officials, it would direct them to a registration form where they would attest to their citizenship, as required by the National Voter Registration Act.”
This is a false and inadequate description of how the automatic voting registration process works. According to Hans Von Spakovsky [9] [10]:
“The largest source of voter registrations are state programs created under Section 5 of the [National Voter Registration Act], known as “Motor Voter,” which requires all states to allow individuals who apply for a driver’s license to register to vote at the same time…States such as Maryland, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington allow illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses, and other states, such as Tennessee, provide licenses to resident aliens.”
Here’s what really happens when automatic voting registration is available:
“To comply with Motor Voter, states automatically offer voter registration to all applicants for a driver’s license. Most government employees do so even when they know the applicants are not citizens because these employees do not want to face claims that they discriminated based on ethnicity, and they believe it is the responsibility of election officials, not state DMVs, to determine the eligibility of voter registration applicants. Yet when license bureaus submit completed registration forms to state election officials, they often omit the citizenship status of the applicants.” [10]
So, your local DMV officer is not going to look into someone’s citizenship status or direct them to a registration form because there is no incentive for them to do so. If he sends off a completed registration form to state election officials, the election official has no reason to doubt the person’s citizenship and thus is unlikely to check the citizenship status of the applicant. This is simple logic that Mulder ignores because it would be inconvenient for his fact check.
Mulder’s logic is this: If it’s a crime, there’s no way anyone would do it. According to Mulder:
“Any voter who falsely attests to citizenship on the registration form would face penalties for perjury which, in Texas, is a class A misdemeanor punishable by fines and up to one year in jail.”
Having a person attest to their citizenship status by checking a box is not the same as having them provide proof of it. Even if a DMV employee or a state official required a person to fill out the registration form per the National Voter Registration Act, there is absolutely no way to verify this information unless proof of citizenship is required. This is a sleight of hand by Mulder to act as though attesting to citizenship is the same as proving it.
Cruz is right, automatic voter registration makes it fast and easy for illegal aliens to register to vote in any of the states where they are able to get a driver’s license. If there are 10 to 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., there could, in fact, be millions of illegal aliens who are able to vote [11].
OUR RATING: #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
Bibliography:
1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1
2] https://cis.org/Report/NonCitizen-Voters
3] https://ballotpedia.org/Center_for_Election_Innovation_and_Research_(CEIR)
6] https://www.heritage.org/report/the-threat-non-citizen-voting
7] https://www.heritage.org/report/the-threat-non-citizen-voting/#_ftnref61
8] https://www.heritage.org/report/the-threat-non-citizen-voting
9] https://www.heritage.org/staff/hans-von-spakovsky
10] https://www.heritage.org/report/the-threat-non-citizen-voting
11] https://cis.org/Camarota/New-Estimate-22-Million-Illegal-Immigrants-Not-Plausible
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