Tea Party Nation president Judson Phillips has been hard at work crunching numbers, and today announces a starting conclusion: President Obama won reelection in 2012 because more than a million people cast votes in two states.
How did Phillips reach this number?
Well, he starts with a North Carolina elections board report that it found 35,750 records of people who voted in the state whose names and birthdays matched people who had voted in other states.
North Carolina used a program run by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, which even Kobach acknowledges produces a “significant number” of “false positives.” Officials using the program in Ohio and Colorado failed to identify a single case of fraudulent voting from the “matches” that the program produced. Even the North Carolina elections board has backtracked from its original blockbuster number, telling ThinkProgress that “we are not jumping to conclusions here.” In other words, North Carolina’s report contains no proof of any voter fraud, much less 35,000 cases of it.
But never mind the facts! Phillips then “extrapolate[s]” the North Carolina figure “out over the entire population” to guess that there “could be over one million double votes in 2012,” thereby winning President Obama the election. (Of course, in Phillips’ reckoning, all of these imaginary cases of voter fraud were perpetrated by Democrats – although they still weren’t enough to win North Carolina for the president).
“Democrats are not winning elections,” he concludes. “ They are taking them the old fashioned way. They are stealing them.”
What is the shocking secret that may explain how Obama got a second term?
A study done in North Carolina showed that 35,750 people who live and voted in North Carolina may have voted in another state in the 2012 Presidential election. The study was based on comparing the first and last names along with date of birth for people who voted in 28 other states. In 765 of those cases, social security numbers matched as well.
This number would have probably been larger but only 28 states participated and the four largest states, California, New York, Texas and Florida did not participate.
If you extrapolate this figure out over the entire population, that could be over one million double votes in 2012.
…
Democrats are not winning elections. They are taking them the old fashioned way. They are stealing them.
Lest we think that Phillips is just pushing a fringe argument, Kobach himself yesterday made a very similar claim, citing absolutely no evidence to claim that widows are voting “all the time” on behalf of their deceased husbands. Kobach has previously claimed that the “radical left” opposes his suppressive policies because they “feel they can benefit” from massive fraud.
And, to Phillips’ credit, his voter fraud estimate is more conservative than that of former Libertarian vice presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root, who estimates that Democrats “across the country” voted ten times each for President Obama .
UPDATE: It appears that Phillips may have gotten his conclusion from Dick Morris, who wrote an op-ed in The Hill this week making the same claim. Meanwhile, the theory is getting debunked again and again.
