A hidden perk

By Cathy Keim

Editor’s note: Cathy will be delivering the content this weekend while I take a little personal time off. By the way, Sunday will be her first anniversary as a co-author.

I received a “Help Save Maryland” newsletter from Brad Botwin the other day. I read through it and one comment about the illegal immigrant population caught my eye. Most people that worry about voter integrity are concerned that illegal immigrants are voting in our elections. But what if the illegal immigrant population decides the next presidential election without even casting individual votes?

Let’s go back to a quick review of the Electoral College. The Electoral College was put into place to keep the more heavily populated areas in the country from dominating the more rural areas.

Each state receives their number of electoral votes based on their representation in Congress; thus, every state receives two electoral votes for their two Senators. The remainder of their electoral votes are determined by the number of Congressmen they have, which means the minimum number of electoral votes that a state receives is three: two for its Senators and at least one for its Congressman. Being a small state, our neighbors to the north in Delaware only have one at-large Congressman so they get three votes.

Additionally, the District of Columbia is guaranteed the same number as the least populous state (Wyoming in the 2010 census) so the District gets three electoral votes, too.

Every state has two Senators for 100 electoral votes and the District of Columbia receives three electoral votes, so the remaining 435 electoral votes are based on Congressional seats. Every ten years after the census, the Congressional seats are apportioned according to population; however, this is not based on legal population or citizens’ population. The census counts everybody.

So illegal immigrants are counted in the census and their population is then used to apportion Congressional seats. Those Congressional seats each come with one Electoral College vote.

The 435 Congressional districts plus 100 Senators plus three for DC equals the 538 total electoral votes which will decide our next President. The winner will need a majority, or 270 Electoral College votes.

Because of the way the census is conducted, the states with larger numbers of illegal immigrants gain extra seats in Congress at the expense of the states with fewer illegal immigrants. If you were to remove the illegal immigrants from the census and only count citizens, then states like California would lose congressional seats and those seats would be reapportioned to other states. Paul Goldman and Mark J. Rozell noted this last year in Politico:

This math gives strongly Democratic states an unfair edge in the Electoral College. Using citizen-only population statistics, American University scholar Leonard Steinhorn projects California would lose five House seats and therefore five electoral votes. New York and Washington would lose one seat, and thus one electoral vote apiece. These three states, which have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats over the latest six presidential elections, would lose seven electoral votes altogether. The GOP’s path to victory, by contrast, depends on states that would lose a mere three electoral votes in total. Republican stronghold Texas would lose two House seats and therefore two electoral votes. Florida, which Republicans must win to reclaim the presidency, loses one seat and thus one electoral vote.

But that leaves the electoral math only half done. The 10 House seats taken away from these states would then need to be reallocated to states with relatively small numbers of noncitizens. The following ten states, the bulk of which lean Republican, would likely gain one House seat and thus one additional electoral vote: Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

Once all the accounting is done, the authors state that the GOP would gain a net four electoral votes if the illegal immigrants were not counted in the census. Remember that Al Gore lost the presidency in 2000 by only three electoral votes despite having the most votes.

The Politico article goes on to consider whether getting rid of the Electoral College is the remedy for this problem, although that could not be done before the election this year. Perhaps a better solution would be to not have millions of illegal immigrants residing in the USA.

The fact that we do have millions of illegal immigrants here points to the fact that our government has chosen to allow this for reasons which they decline to reveal to the American citizen. We can deduce that cheap labor is one of the obvious reasons. Another could be that there is always a push to legalize them and then they would be added onto the voting rolls and mostly on the Democrat side. Even if they never achieve citizenship, their children which are born here are citizens and they have also been shown to predominately lean Democrat.

You might say that the Electoral College advantage is just one more built in perk to a corrupted immigration system that favors the Democrat Party.