Duncan Hunter, last seen falling behind Alan Keyes in Iowa, despite Keyes being on the campaign trail all of two weeks, is trying to push his way back into the GOP nomination by jumping on the anti-brown people bandwagon. He’s now claiming that illegal aliens vote routinely in California, conveniently without any evidence whatsoever. The quote, made in the recent Republican debate on African-American issues in Baltimore, was: “We have right now a real danger of people that are illegally in the country being rounded up, herded into the polls, we’ve seen that in California, voting illegally. That disenfranchises everybody in that community.” Brad Friedman of BradBlog, after getting no response from the Hunter campaign backing up his charges, thinks he knows what Hunter is talking about, making him more of a genius than I am.
Our best guess as to what Hunter imagines he was referring to was the contested House election in California’s 46th district between Loretta Sanchez (D) and Bob Dornan (R) in 1996. Sanchez was ultimately declared the winner by less than 1000 votes. Dornan then contested the election, alleging thousands of illegal votes by non-citizens.
Actual evidence, as opposed to wild, unsupported allegations by Republicanist media outlets is difficult to come by. But what happened in that race — after a lot of Googling and even purchased articles from newspaper archives, far more research than we suspect Hunter ever did before making his unfounded accusations in a Presidential Debate — seems to be this:
Sketchy evidence from 14 months of county, state, and federal investigations suggests that there were some non-citizens who may have voted in the election, though not enough to change the election results even if they did. They did so without the intent of knowingly violating the law. Most of the allegations had to do with an Hispanic group that had registered immigrants to vote as they were preparing to become U.S. citizens. Most of those registrants had, in fact, become citizens by the time they actually voted.
Dornan contested the election under the Federal Contested Elections Act. The challenge was eventually dismissed in a lopsided 378 to 33 vote in the Republican majority-led U.S. House in 1998. That vote came on the heels of an 8 to 1 recommendation by the Republican majority-led House Oversight Committee, after a Republican majority-led task force, comprised of Republicans Bob Ney (now-jailed) and Vernon Ehlers (now ranking member of the House Admin Comm. who replaced Ney when he went to jail) and Democrat Steny Hoyer (now House Majority leader) ran an 18-month investigation into the allegations.
At the state level, the D.A. in heavily Republican Orange County and Republican Secretary of State Bill Jones both investigated the matter as well. Both state investigations ultimately decided against bringing any voter fraud indictments. Both were unable to prove that anyone had the intent of voting illegally, deciding instead that the voters in question “had registered in error and not from criminal intent,” according to Lorraine Minnite’s 1993 Demos report on “Securing the Vote: an analysis of Election Fraud” [PDF, see pages 40 to 42].
All told, according to Minnite, some $1.4 million in tax-payer dollars was spent in the state, county, and federal investigations. Nobody was ever charged with voter fraud.
This is one of those wingnut zombie lies that refuses to die. They make them with impunity because virtually nobody in the traditional media ever calls them on it. But they are willfully, insistently, knowingly wrong.
Something to say?
