January 26, 2019

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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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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