Texas Is Looking for Fraudulent Immigrant Voters

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Our boys in Texas are busy on the voter fraud front:

The Texas secretary of state’s office announced Friday it would send local election officials a list of 95,000 registered voters who the state says counties should consider checking to see whether they are U.S. citizens and, therefore, eligible to vote….Among the individuals flagged, about 58,000 individuals cast ballots in one or more elections from 1996 to 2018.

Texas seems to produce about 6 million votes per national election (average of presidential and nonpresidential cycles), so that’s about 70 million votes. Add in local elections and you’re probably at around 100 million. So if every single one of those 58,000 votes was fraudulent, that would be…

…about 0.06% of all votes cast.

That doesn’t seem so bad. But of course, the true number won’t be 58,000. Nor will it be 5,800 or 580 or even 58. It will be about zero. And how many of the 95,000 people on the list will turn out to be noncitizens? There will be a few. I’m going to take a guess and say that Texas will verify noncitizen status for, oh, 500 people. Who wants to take the over?

POSTSCRIPT: Actually, I suppose that before we bet on a number, we have to bet on whether Texas will ever even release the results of their cunning little dragnet. Probably not. My guess is that they’ll find a few people, make a big deal out of it, and then quietly shut down the whole thing.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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