"We Do Not Have A Number"
Sound Politics
That's what Secretary of State Sam Reed just said when asked on the John Carlson show how many non-citizens voted in Washington. Reed went on to say that it "does not appear to be a problem of real magnitude".
The basic numbers again: Roughly 6 percent of Washington's population of approximately 6 million are non-citizens. If half of them are 18 or over, then Washington has 180,000 non-citizens old enough to vote. (I think more than half are over 18, but I want to keep my estimates both simple and conservative.) If 1 in 100 voted, then there were 1,800 non-citizen votes in the last election. For ethnic reasons, I would expect them to vote Democratic by at least 2 to 1.
I don't know what Secretary Reed means when he says that the problem is not of real magnitude, but I can say that in this last governor's election, 1 in 100 is of real magnitude. In fact, 1 in 500 is of real magnitude.
To his credit, John Carlson has a practical proposal for identifying some non-citizens, asking for the help of the foreign consulates. In particular, Carlson suggesting getting the lists of Matricula Consular ID cards from the Mexican consul and checking them against our voter list. Some other countries have started issuing similar cards to their nationals, so the check might be able to include them, too.
To his very great credit, Sam Reed took to the idea immediately. And it turns out that he knows the local Mexican consul and thinks he would cooperate. It's a good idea, and Reed's enthusiasm sounded genuine. And Reed did support, again, the idea that it was reasonable to check for citizenship when voters register.
This is not the only way to investigate how many non-citizens vote. As I mentioned before in a comment to another post, a newspaper that was interested in this question could investigate it fairly easily. How? Get a reporter who spoke Spanish, or Chinese, or whatever, and go to neighborhoods with many immigrants. Promise anonymity and start walking and asking questions. (The same thing could be done by private investigators, but their promises of anonymity might not get as much trust. I would discourage anyone from trying this on their own unless they were very familiar with the area.)
There are also some statistical ways to investigate this problem by examining voting patterns over time. I have some tentative ideas for doing this myself. If you have any suggestions or you know of any precincts that you think might have many non-citizen voters, I would be interested in hearing about them.
(Stefan types faster than I do. But there's enough different in my post that I thought I would add it as is, in spite of some duplicated points.)
Posted by Jim Miller
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