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In 2012, Florida’s secretary of state, Ken Detzner, asked county election supervisors to send letters to 180,000 people who were on the voter rolls in Florida but had shown up, in a cross-check against the driver’s license database, as being non-citizens. Supervisors of election objected, as did the American Civil Liberties Union, claiming eligible voters could be disenfranchised, even though Detzner was simply asking them to send out letters requesting proof of citizenship. The list was whittled down, but the hue and cry did not abate. Eventually, Detzner pulled the request, promising to revisit the issue when more accurate data could be obtained.

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“Democrats have always tried to downplay election fraud of various kinds because it usually benefits them,” says Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. “The people who shouldn’t be voting are overwhelmingly voting for Democrats.”

After the 2016 presidential election — in which Donald Trump won the electoral college, and thus the election, but Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes — Clinton said that she would join recounts in several states that Trump had won. Trump responded by tweeting: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

If Agresti’s numbers are right, and if millions of non-citizens are voting illegally in U.S. presidential elections, it’s possible that Trump is right.

In early February, President Trump announced he was appointing Vice President Mike Pence to lead a commission to investigate voter-registration issues, including fraud.

Voting by non-citizens, said Krikorian, is “one of the things they’re going to look at.”[lz_pagination]