In what is apparently completely unimportant news to just about everyone except NBC2 in Southwest Florida and Andrew Breitbart, numerous instances of illegal voting by non-citizens have been uncovered. Projecting the problems across the state and into the rest of the nation would seem to indicate that many thousands of people who are registered to vote should never have been allowed to register and are routinely casting ballots illegally.
A Google News search on "Florida vote fraud" (not in quotes) at Google News at 11:00 PM ET indicated that there was a grand total of six stories on this disturbing development. Immediately below the reference to the non-citizen voting news is a link to a Tampa Bay Times editorial posted two days ago which claimed that voter fraud is "a nonexistent problem in this state." Uh huh. What follows are excerpts from each segment (Part 1; Part 2) of Andy Pierrotti's NBC2 report (also look at the TV reports at the links, which differ from the text below):
(From Part 1)
NBC2 Investigates: Voter fraud
Two elections supervisors are taking action after an NBC2 investigation uncovers flawed record keeping and human error allowing people who are not citizens of the United States to vote.
No one knows how widespread this problem is, because county election supervisors have no way to track non-citizens who live here.
So NBC2 did something election officials never thought to do, and found them on our own.
"I vote every year," Hinako Dennett told NBC2.
The Cape Coral resident is not a US citizen, yet she's registered to vote.
NBC2 found Dennett after reviewing her jury excusal form. She told the Clerk of Court she couldn't serve as a juror because she wasn't a U.S. citizen.
We found her name, and nearly a hundred others like her, in the database of Florida registered voters.
... Based on our investigation, both election offices say they'll now request a copy of every jury excusal form where residents say they can't serve because they're not a citizen.
(From Part 2)
Poor record keeping is what's leading to potential fraud in the elections system. And election supervisors say registering non-citizens will continue until they get more help.
Officials we spoke to say non U.S. citizens are voting in Lee and Collier counties.
"If there is a change by one vote and somebody's voted that really has no right to be voting," said Lee County Supervisor of Elections Sharon Harrington.
Nearly 100 registered are now under investigation for possible voter fraud.
"It could change the whole complexion of an election," Harrington said.
We found those 100 people after reviewing jury excusal forms. We compared the names of those who said they couldn't serve because they were not U.S. citizens to those listed on Florida's voter registration rolls.
"I was surprised that there were quite that many," Harrington said.
It would have been nice if Pierrotti had told viewers what the error rate was, i.e., how many jury excusal forms did it take before they got to nearly 100 ineligible voters? 200? 500? 1,000? It would also be nice to know what percentage of registered voters are called for jury duty in any given year, because the chances that there are non-citizens voting who have never been called for jury duty would appear to be quite high, and might possibly be a multiple of the number who were caught through excusal forms.
Depending on the error rate found, projecting the problem across all of Florida could lead one to reasonably believe that there are thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of non-citizens who either registered themselves and are voting illegally, or that others who have posed as them, with or without their knowledge, have registered and are voting on their behalf. It's not a great leap to speculate that the number of illegally registered non-citizens is in the tens to hundreds of thousands nationwide.
But voter fraud "a nonexistent problem in this state." Just ask the Tampa Bay Tribune. What a crock.
Don't expect the rest of the establishment press to notice this disturbing and disconcerting story.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
