Ahem. Because 45 has continued to assert that as many as five million undocumented people voted (illegally), Mr. Hinderaker has been put in the position of dissembling for this clear lie.
And John himself tells patently silly lies, in trying to do so.
The “study” both 45’s current Press Secretary Spicer, and Mr. Hinderaker obviously point to, makes a small claim, on small numbers, that the 2008 and 2012 elections may have seen small numbers of illegal votes cast. Not 2016. Not at all.
Even so, the authors of that study have walked even their meager conclusions back, and significantly so, in 2014 and later writings — due to small size, and small effect. John doesn’t mention that.
Of course, he couldn’t — if he were trying to defend 45’s outright lie.
The “study” — flawed though it was — was actually a survey, in which some 38 illegal votes were self reported, on a sample size of over 58,000. That’s an incidence rate of just about 6/100ths of ONE PER CENT — or 0.00065.
If we multiply that infinitesimal “incidence rate” by what is the most generous estimate of 2016 registered voters, some 200 million people in the USA… we then arrive at a upper limit of about 131,000 illegal votes cast, on over 200 million legal ones.
Mr. Trump (in his speeches) continually claims that about 38 times as many illegal votes were cast, in 2016. Poppycock. No survey could EVER be that far off — he needs to find almost 40 times as many illegal votes as his best supporter can theorize, in order to be right.
Mr. Hinderaker leaps this yawning Grand Canyon of mathematics — in a single bound — by foolishly spouting that “illegal immigration has risen since 2012.”
Maybe there are more undocumented workers here than were here in 2012. Maybe. But 38 times as many? Said another way, all New York — the entire population — state-wide, combined… must now be illegal (must have magically transmorgified from citizens, to aliens — in under four years — all of them), in order for John’s (and Spicer’s and 45’s) math to be remotely plausible. [Or a similar number, nation-wide — in hundreds of thousands of pockets, in towns across our nation.]
No… Mr. Trump and his wife (we presume) are here lawfully. They are residents of New York — and they were in 2012. His claim is — per force — flatly false.
Impossibly, and verifiably false. On math alone, we may quibble about whether 100,000 or 300,000 votes were cast unlawfully — but not 5 million. There is no chance that number could ever be forced out of this data.
Here endeth the lesson.
John Hinderaker be-clowns his law degree, once again. He knows his is a lie. Of course he does. He has lost his soul.
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