Trump Is Right — Millions Of Illegals Probably Did Vote In 2016

..."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," Trump tweeted to the barely concealed contempt of many in the media.

Typical was the utterly dismissive headline in The Nation, the flagship publication of the progressive movement: "The President-Elect Is An Internet Troll."

The Washington Post's "The Fix" blog site did a little better: "Donald Trump's new explanation for losing the popular vote? A Twitter-born conspiracy theory."

There are many more, too many to put here. Most follow the same theme: Trump foolishly followed the faulty analysis of Gregg Phillips of True The Vote, an online anti-voter-fraud site and app. Phillips estimates that illegals cast three million votes in the 2016 election. He's wrong. Heck, even the liberal fact-checking site FactCheck.org says so.

It's almost certain that illegals did vote — and in significant numbers. Whether it was three million or not is another question.

While states control the voter registration process, some states are so notoriously slipshod in their controls (California, Virginia and New York — all of which have political movements to legalize voting by noncitizens — come to mind) that it would be shocking if many illegals didn'tvote. Remember, a low-ball estimate says there are at least 11 million to 12 million illegals in the U.S., but that's based on faulty Census data. More likely estimates put the number at 20 million to 30 million.

What's disappointing is that instead of at least seriously considering Trump's charge, many media reports merely parrot leftist talking points and anti-Trump rhetoric by pushing the idea that Republicans and others not of the progressive left who seek to limit voting to citizens only are racist, xenophobic nuts.

But there is evidence to back Trump's claims. A 2014 study in the online Electoral Studies Journalshows that in the 2008 and 2010 elections, illegal immigrant votes were in fact quite high.

"We find that some noncitizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and congressional elections," wrote Jesse T. Richman, Gulshan A. Chattha, both of Old Dominion University, and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

More specifically, they write, "Noncitizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress."

Specifically, the authors say that illegals may have cast as many as 2.8 million votes in 2008 and 2010. That's a lot of votes...