Powerful Groups Are Hiding Facts About Illegal Voting by Non-Citizens

Overview

Massive government-funded media outlets and other information powerbrokers are keeping Americans in the dark about the prevalence of illegal voting by non-citizens.

They are doing this by betraying a core rule of honest journalism: “No story is fair if it omits facts of major importance or significance.”

Such deceitful reporting is impairing the integrity of the U.S. electoral system by enabling illegal voting to go unchecked. This fraud negates the votes of U.S. citizens, thus usurping their Constitutional right to vote.

Background

In May 2024, Just Facts published an eye-opening study which found that roughly:

• 2 to 5 million non-citizens are illegally registered to vote in the United States.
• 1.0 to 2.7 million of them will illegally vote in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections unless better anti-fraud measures are implemented.

The study went viral with influential people, organizations, news outlets, and websites citing it. This includes U.S. Senator Mike Lee, Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky, the Daily Wire, True the Vote, the Republican National Committee, the New York Post, Leading Report, Maria Bartiromo, and a post on X with more than 24 million views due to a repost by Elon Musk.

Underscoring the study’s reach and import, it was attacked by the New York Times, Snopes, the Cato Institute, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. In June, Just Facts published an article that systematically debunked their arguments.

Now, a new gamut of organizations are assailing the study, including:

• NPR and the BBC, two of the world’s largest taxpayer-funded media outlets.
• the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a non-profit liberal legal powerhouse that had $109 million in revenues during 2023.
• NewsGuard, an organization that partners with government agencies like the State Department, Department of Defense, and World Health Organization to allegedly “counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies.”

Despite the massive resources of these organizations, their attacks on the study consisted of discredited arguments that have already been refuted by documented facts.

Furthermore, these facts are unavoidable to anyone who simply reads the study and an article linked at the bottom of it in a note that says, “Just Facts has published a thorough rebuttal to critiques of this study.”

The Cato Institute

Among the most naive of their arguments, Allison Anderman, an attorney who writes for the Brennan Center, claims that Just Facts’ study is wrong because “the conservative Cato Institute” says so.

Likewise, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, an NYU professor named Yann LeCun, argues that “even the conservative Cato Institute knows that the numbers of non-citizens who vote are so infinitesimally small as to be completely inconsequential.”

Above and beyond the fact that Just Facts has already debunked Cato’s arguments, the Cato Institute is not conservative. Rather, it is libertarian, and it is so far left on the issue of immigration that it lobbies for open borders.

Those facts are hard to miss given that the second paragraph of the “About Us” page on Cato’s website states that it “promotes libertarian ideas,” and a commentary on the website by Cato’s VP of research is titled, “Forget the Wall Already, It’s Time for the U.S. to Have Open Borders.”

In other words, these scholars—one of whom leads the creation of artificial intelligence for the world’s largest social media company—either failed to conduct basic research or are deliberately misleading their readers.

“Selected the Wrong Box”

A common thread among the attacks on Just Facts’ study is the allegation that certain scholars previously debunked it. In the words of NPR reporter Jude Joffe-Block, Just Facts’ study is based on “discredited estimates” from a “widely contested 2014 paper” that was rejected by 200 political scientists in “an open letter.”

More specifically, Joffe-Block claims that the 2014 study “was methodologically unsound because” it was based on a large survey in which “a small subset of people who reported being noncitizen voters could easily have been citizens who had simply selected the wrong box.”

In reality, that claim has always been questionable and is irrelevant to Just Facts’ study, which uses data from 2022. Here are the pivotal facts that NPR, the BBC, the Brennan Center, and NewsGuard kept from their audiences:

• The authors of the 2014 paper, published by the academic journal Electoral Studies, foresaw and refuted that argument in an appendix of the study.
• Critics attacked the 2014 paper without acknowledging—much less addressing—the facts that appeared in its appendix and five other publications that rebutted their argument.
• Their argument is inapplicable to Just Facts’ study, which is based on data from a 2022 survey in which “multiple citizenship questions” were asked to “limit the possibility of honest mistakes by survey respondents.”

All of those facts are readily available and documented with links to primary sources in Just Facts’ study and its rebuttal to critics. Yet, Joffe-Block, who claims to be a journalist “specializing in deeply reported stories,” simply ignores these facts.

Even more misleading, NewsGuard’s article falsely claims that Just Facts’ study “heavily relied” on survey data from “2008 and 2010” that was used in the “2014 study.” A simple read of Just Facts’ study shows that isn’t true. Moreover, the study provides a spreadsheet that proves:

• 100% of the data on non-citizen voter registration is from a 2022 survey.
• one of the study’s formulas uses data from the 2014 study to calculate a denominator, and if this figure were affected by the error that critics imagine, it would actually decrease the non-citizen voter registration rate.

Remarkably, NewsGuard’s article was written by seven authors, none of whom detected this blatant falsehood. This includes Senior Staff Analyst Chiara Vercellone, Politics Editor Sam Howard, Editor McKenzie Sadeghi, Staff Analyst Coalter Palmer, Staff Analyst Sofia Rubinson, Senior Analyst Becca Schimmel, and News Verification Reporter Sarah Komar.

“One Percent”

Among those who downplay illegal voting by non-citizens, another common claim is that the lead author of the 2014 paper has dramatically reduced his estimate of non-citizen voter registration from 25% to 1%.

In the 2014 paper, Dr. Jesse Richman and two of his colleagues at Old Dominion University and George Mason University found that “roughly one quarter of non-citizens” in the U.S. “were likely registered to vote.” In contrast, Richman estimated in a 2023 report that “approximately one percent of non-citizens” are registered to vote.

According to BBC reporter Mike Wendling, who is the “co-founder of the BBC’s disinformation unit,” Richman used “more recent” data to “conclude in 2023 that 1% of non-citizens were registered to vote.”

In reality, Richman’s figure of 1% is based on measures that lowball the rate of non-citizen voter registration. This is proven by:

• a statement from Richman in which he admitted that he tried to “minimize the risk that the estimate could be biased upwards” for a “court case,” thus creating “an increased risk that the estimate could be biased downwards.”
• an extensive appendix by Just Facts that details how the 1% figure is based on narrow or distorted measures that underestimate the rate of non-citizen voter registration.

Even though these facts are plainly stated and thoroughly documented in Just Facts’ study, Wendling chose to ignore them even after Just Facts President Jim Agresti reiterated them to Wendling in a recorded interview and an email to him.

Instead of presenting these facts, Wendling wrote that “Agresti said that his own calculations produced a number that was at the very least ten times” the 1% figure. When Wendling did this, he stripped out the hyperlinks that Agresti provided to him. This created the illusion that Agresti made a totally unsupported claim, when in reality, he presented a thoroughly documented fact. This kind of link-purging is a common ploy of “fact checkers” and journalists.

More Falsehoods and Half-Truths

Other fact-deficient canards used by NPR, the BBC, NewsGuard, and/or the Brennan Center include the following:

• It’s “not possible to draw statistical conclusions from a relatively small number of survey participants”—when in fact—the survey in Just Facts’ study is large enough to measure statistically significant nationwide results with at least 95% confidence.
• The survey “does not constitute a representative sample of the population—when in fact—the evidence suggests it does.
• Just Facts is merely a “website”—when in fact—it is a research and educational institute that has been cited, complimented, and commended by a diverse array of scholars, peer-reviewed journals, major media outlets, government entities, and think tanks.
• Just Facts is a “pro-Trump” organization—when in fact—it recently published an article that refutes Trump’s false claims about violent crime, a post that critiques his plan for “tax cuts,” and a video documenting that he contributed to inflation.
• “Investigations into voter rolls show very few immigrants registered to vote and even fewer voting”—when in fact—the ability to vet the rolls is severely limited by lax voter registration laws, rampant identity fraud among illegal immigrants, and the refusal of certain states and the Biden administration to release data on the citizenship status of voters.

Conclusion

In a recent interview on CBS News, Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, claimed there are “no facts underlying” the assertion that “non-citizens are going to vote.”

Although Mayorkas’ claim is belied by numerous facts, he can slip this falsehood past all Americans who trust the information powerbrokers that hide vital facts about this issue from their audiences.

By James D. Agresti

James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a research and educational institute dedicated to publishing facts about public policies and teaching research skills.