Do you plan to vote this November? You’re not alone. Experts say somewhere between 1.5 million and 2.7 million illegal immigrants are likely to cast a ballot in the 2024 elections, affecting races from dogcatcher to president of the United States.

The historic flood of illegal immigrants during the Biden-Harris administration has also padded voter rolls, thanks to controversial federal legislation from the Clinton administration. If illegal immigrants and other noncitizens vote in the same proportion as in previous U.S. elections, the number will range anywhere from 1.5 million to nearly 3 million votes.

“A 2014 academic journal found that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008,” Kerri Toloczko, executive director of Election Integrity Network and senior adviser to the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, told The Washington Stand. “There are about 24 million noncitizens in the U.S. right now. If they voted only at the same rate of 6.4% this year as they did in 2008, they would account for 1.5 million votes.”

That ponderous number of unlawful votes may just be the tip of the iceberg. “Based on the increased noncitizen activity at state DMVs, and the work of left-wing voter registration activists, this 6.4% could be much higher than it was in 2008. We could be looking at over 2 million unlawful noncitizen votes,” she told the Washington Stand.

Her estimate largely dovetails with a previous study showing 2.7 million noncitizens are likely to vote in the 2024 election.

The author of that study—James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of the think tank and fact-check website Just Facts—confirmed to the Washington Stand that “the most comprehensive, transparent, and rigorous study on this matter found that about 2 [million] to 5 million noncitizens are illegally registered to vote, and aggressive attempts to debunk the study have completely failed.”

Opponents of election integrity laws minimize the problem by claiming it is already illegal for foreigners to vote in U.S. elections. But, unlike other purported threats, the problem truly holds the power to undermine our democracy, election experts say. “The Left likes to use phrases like, ‘It’s not that widespread,’” Toloczko observed. “But how many does a moral relativist uninterested in upholding the law think is too many?” And “if every unlawful vote cancels out the vote of a lawful citizen voter, how many of those are acceptable?”

Would 2 million unlawful votes be “enough to possibly make a difference in House and Senate races, and even the presidency?” she asked. “You bet.”

Agresti noted that “the claim that noncitizens rarely vote is based on studies with absurd methodologies. For example, they measure the prevalence of this crime by merely counting convictions for it.”

This is “ridiculous,” Agresti told the Washington Stand. He compared the statistic to measuring the number of Americans who illegally use narcotics “based on guilty pleas and verdicts.”

“The same applies to any other law that isn’t strictly enforced, like driving above the speed limit,” he added.

The House of Representatives released a 22-page report in June documenting illegal immigrants voting in the United States. Under current law, 17 cities in California, Maryland, and Vermont as well as the District of Columbia allow noncitizens to vote. While the noncitizens are supposed to vote only in local elections, “mistakes” have been reported.

Toloczko highlighted documented cases of foreigners illegally voting in U.S. elections. “The federal government recently indicted a group of noncitizens from 15 different countries on federal voting charges. Texas recently purged 6,500 noncitizens from its voter rolls—30% of whom had voting records,” Toloczko told TWS, expressing similar thoughts in The Stream.

Illegal immigration impacts U.S. elections in a second way: Counting noncitizens in the U.S. Census redistributes eight congressional seats and, with them, their Electoral College votes which elect the president, a team of immigration scholars found.

America’s teeming illegal immigrant population gives additional congressional seats to California (3), Texas (2), New York, New Jersey, and Florida (one each); and it takes seats away from Alabama, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, Ohio, Rhode Island, and West Virginia (one seat each). Illegal immigrants alone transfer one seat each from Ohio, Alabama, and Minnesota to California, Texas, and New York, the study from the Center for Immigration Studies found.

House Republicans have sought to address the problem by passing a number of border security and election integrity measures, including the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act (H.R. 8281), which would require local election officials to verify someone’s U.S. citizenship status before registering that person to vote. It passed the House of Representatives in July.

“States are prohibited from requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship,” thanks to court interpretations of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) told Fox Business show “Mornings with Maria” on Tuesday. “Democrats who vote against that show what they are really up to—that they want noncitizens to vote and rig our elections.”

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., has called the bill’s passage “a generation-defining moment.” Johnson favors attaching the election integrity bill to a must-pass continuing resolution to keep the government funded past the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30 and avert a government shutdown. Yet Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has declared the bill dead on arrival in the Senate.

“What is he afraid of?” Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., asked on Tuesday morning on Fox Business.

The underlying numbers behind the 1.5 million to 2.7 million noncitizen vote count may undercount the extent of the problem. Yale University researchers estimated the size of the U.S. illegal immigrant population at 16 million to 29 million in 2016, before the Biden-Harris administration enacted border policies that saw record-breaking levels of illegal immigration every year to date.

While administration officials channeled illegal immigration into ports of entry and other means such as the CBP One app, which reduce the number of entries on paper during this presidential election year, experts say the number of overall immigrants entering the U.S. has remained the same or increased.

Americans have increasingly groaned under the strain of illegal immigration. Video footage has shown members of the Venezuelan transnational criminal organization Tren de Aragua rampaging through the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, where they reportedly terrorize and extort residents of multiple apartment buildings.

The Biden-Harris administration has placed roughly 20,000 Haitians in the city of Springfield, Ohio—a city of 58,000 Americans—where they have proceeded to drive up housing costs, underbid American workers for jobs, and engage in a spree of car crashes. The problem has reportedly spread to the nearby town of Tremont. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, recently sent the city millions of dollars and deployed a team of Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers to get the deadly traffic problem under control.

Although the legacy media attempted to pin a large reported number of bomb threats against Springfield schools and other institutions on Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, and other politicians who have highlighted the city’s plight, DeWine verified that officials determined that all 33 threats were “hoaxes” that originated overseas.

Mayors of Aurora and Tremont say they were not consulted about the resettling of these foreigners in their cities.

A Axios/Harris Poll released in April showed a majority of Americans support the mass deportation of illegal immigrants back to their countries of origin. Overall, 51% of U.S. citizens back the Trump-endorsed policy of deportations, including about half (46%) of all registered Independents. A surprisingly high 42% of Democrats support mass deportations, likely fueled by the increasing number of black Americans—who have voted in the past as high as 9 out of 10 for the Democratic presidential candidate—who see their neighborhoods affected by a surging illegal immigrant population, especially in sanctuary cities. Their cities’ Democratic leaders often divert taxpayer funds, and deny taxpayer-funded services to U.S. citizens, in favor of illegal immigrants.

As the government funding drama plays out at the U.S. Capitol, America First Legal has filed numerous lawsuits contending that two provisions of federal law—8 U.S.C. § 1373(c) and 8 U.S.C. § 16—already allow state and local officials to obtain information about applicants’ citizenship status before registration.

“The reason why [Democrats have] got that wide-open border is so they can get as many illegals in here and get them to vote, so they can dominate the American vote,” Rep. Mike Ezell, R-Miss., told “Washington Watch” in July. “They want to dominate the House, the Senate, and the White House.”

“They want to get elected by any means necessary,” Ezell said.

Originally published by The Washington Stand

The post Experts Predict Up to 2.7M Votes Will Be Cast by Illegal Immigrants appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Rod McGuirk / Associated Press:
Australian police say they infiltrated Ghost, a global encrypted communications app developed for criminals, arresting dozens, including the app's alleged admin  —  Australian police said Wednesday they have infiltrated Ghost, an encrypted global communications app developed for criminals, leading to dozens of arrests.

Financial Times:
A planned UK data center project in Abbots Langley, seen as a test for the new Labour government's data center push, stokes tensions among the local community  —  Plans for facility on greenbelt land stokes tensions among local community  —  The row of thatched and timbered cottages …

On Tuesday, hundreds of encrypted Hezbollah pagers in Lebanon and Syria began exploding at the same time. According to The New York Times, witnesses saw smoke coming out of the pockets of victims followed by a small explosion that sounded like fireworks or a gunshot. 

Lebanon’s health minister said Tuesday that at least eight people have been killed and 2,700 were injured. The tiny country’s hospitals were overwhelmed with patients suffering from burn wounds, blown-up hands, and groin injuries. 

While Israel has not taken responsibility, who else could it be? This kind of precise, imaginative sabotage has been a calling card of the Mossad for decades. Indeed, Hezbollah’s pagers exploded on the same day Israel’s domestic security organization, the Shin Bet, announced that it had foiled a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former senior security using a claymore mine that would have detonated by a cellular device in Lebanon. Talk about being hoisted on one’s petard. 

And yet for all of Israel’s tactical brilliance, its strategic position with regard to Hezbollah remains perilous. After October 7, when the Lebanese militia began firing barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones at northern Israel, some 100,000 Israelis had to flee their homes on Israel’s northern border. Nearly a year later, they still cannot return. 

This has been a pattern. 

Consider Israel’s mortal enemy, Iran. Over the last 15 years, the Mossad appears to have Iran’s regime wired for sound. In 2020, a truck fitted with a remote control machine gun shot down Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, while he was on his way to his vacation home on the Caspian Sea. The operation was straight out of the finale of Breaking Bad. 

Before the killing of Fakhrizadeh, Mossad operatives in 2018 broke into a warehouse full of secret plans and schematics that comprised the archives of Iran’s secret nuclear program. Israeli agents made off with the archive and then presented the material to the International Atomic Energy Agency and later, reporters from all over the world. It was an intelligence coup by any measure.  

Earlier, in 2009, Israeli and American intelligence agencies inserted a cyber worm known as Stuxnet into the software that controlled the speed that centrifuges spun to enrich uranium in Iran’s Natanz facility. The operation destroyed the machines, and for a few months Iran’s program was set back.

All of these operations demonstrated an operational cunning and competence that are the stuff of spy novels. And yet Iran today is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to the U.S. government’s own recent estimates. 

“I think it’s fair to say the Israelis have tended to look at strategy as an accumulation of tactical victories,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operations officer who is now a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Free Press. “That obviously has been tested to the max with the Islamic Republic of Iran. I think the Israelis are aware it hasn’t worked.”

This failure of Israeli covert action to improve its strategic standing in the Middle East is perhaps best demonstrated by its recent killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. At the end of July, Haniyeh lost his life in an explosion at the guest house where he was staying during the inauguration of Iran’s new president, who lost his life this spring in a helicopter crash. 

Not only did Israel’s agents reportedly manage to sneak a bomb inside a guest house in the capital city of their mortal enemy, but after Iran vowed revenge, to this day it has yet to follow through on its threat. That sounds like an unbelievable success. But there’s a catch. Because of Iran’s mere threat of retaliation, most commercial airlines have stopped their flights to Israel, further isolating a country maligned for fighting a war in Gaza started by Iran’s proxy, Hamas. Indeed, after the pager explosions, Air France and Lufthansa have canceled flights to Tel Aviv, fearing Hezbollah’s retaliation. 

In this respect, the real story is not that covert action for Israel is worthless. Gerecht stressed that the tactical success of these operations have value. The prospect of every encrypted Hezbollah pager exploding at the same time may be a psychological deterrent for the organization’s middle managers and others. 

But they will not deter Hezbollah from launching the missiles and rockets into Israel that make it impossible for 100,000 citizens to return home. As Gerecht said, “Israel’s tactical brilliance is no substitute for serious hard power and military interventions.”

Put another way, Israel cannot defeat its enemies by waging war only in the shadows. 

Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @EliLake and read his piece “Israel Is Not Equivalent to Hamas.”

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When it was founded in 2001, Wikipedia had an idealistic mission: to provide all the world’s information for free—gathered, updated, and fact-checked democratically by the people. But in recent years, as our politics have become increasingly angry and divided, so too have the key editors of Wikipedia who engage openly in battles over “the truth.” In this investigation, which was originally published by Pirate Wires, Ashley Rindsberg looks at how Wikipedia became a propaganda project, where a handful of editors are reshaping history before our eyes.

And for more great writing at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture, subscribe to Pirate Wires’ daily newsletter here.

As the wave of relief washed through the Democratic Party in July following Biden’s decision to step aside, both Democrats and Republicans instantly understood that one of Harris’s biggest weaknesses was also among the most critical issues of the race—illegal immigration at the southern border. 

Republicans were quick to point out Harris had been appointed border czar by Biden and the failure was hers to own. Democrats denied Harris had ever been appointed “czar,” calling the claim a GOP talking point.

Voters who googled the question would likely have encountered a Wikipedia article listing presidential czars—as valuable a resource as any. Visitors who accessed the “List of executive branch czars” article on July 24 would have been informed that Kamala Harris had, indeed, served as border czar. But those who came to the page a day later, specifically after 4:02 p.m. Eastern Time, would have found no mention of Harris at all.

Within minutes of Harris’s removal, the article’s Talk page erupted into an edit war with numerous editors pointing out that Harris’s name had only been added to the article the day before it had been removed from it, suggesting it had been added for political purposes. The resolution to this quandary hinged on a seemingly simple, even binary question: Was Harris border czar or not?

In cases of factual disagreement like this one, Wikipedia defaults to its core operating principles—including Wikipedia:No original research, which prohibits the inclusion of claims or assertions “for which no reliable, published source exists,” and Wikipedia:Verifiability, which ensures that “information comes from a reliable source.”

In this case, there was a dilemma. The media, in the wake of Harris’s overnight nomination, denied Harris had ever been border czar. “[T]he Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title—which she never actually had,” wrote Stef W. Kight in Axios on July 24. Yet a month after Biden had made a speech tasking Harris with overseeing aspects of the border crisis, Axios reported, “Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the ‘root causes’ that drive migration.” (In March 2021, Kight herself reported that Biden had put Harris “in charge of addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border.”) The BBC made a similar claim the day of Biden’s speech. (“Announcing Ms. Harris’s appointment as his immigration czar, Mr. Biden told reporters. . . ” the article read.) Other reports from that time, including one from CNN, noted that Republicans had attempted to pin the term czar onto Harris’s role for political reasons, prompting the White House to push back years before Harris’s candidacy.

The debate on the article’s Talk page became heated. “Wikipedia’s editors once again showing utter contempt of history itself and an embrace of Orwellianism,” one editor wrote.

“This is just a case of contemporary politics being played with [Wikipedia] content, as ‘the border’ is the #1, 2, and 3 issue of the Trumpists. Get the banhammer ready,” said another editor.

Impassioned as it was, the Harris “czar” flap was just one skirmish amid the ceaseless battles over Wikipedia articles with even remotely political resonance.

Wikipedia articles present their subject matter with a casually authoritative, almost stolid tone. But beneath the surface lies endless argumentation played out in rounds of procedural maneuvering that would shame the most deft legislative hand. User bans, discretionary sanctions, requests for comment, arbitration cases, topic bans, page bans, deprecated sources—all encoded in a shorthand jargon—lie behind the “consensus” displayed in an article’s seemingly ripple-free surface. In a way, this arcana of behind-the-scenes conceptual machinery is Wikipedia’s most impressive feature. It’s what keeps it from grinding to a halt on infighting and intransigence.

The problem is—like with the Harris border czar reference, which is still omitted from the czar article (and will almost certainly stay that way)—the consensus it achieves often lines up with the prerogatives of the Democratic Party and the media establishment that supports it.

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The night of the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, pop star Taylor Swift decided to use her platform to endorse the Democratic nominee. But as some have pointed out, it did not seem to have the impact the Left thought it would.

The singer, widely known for her catchy tunes about breakups and poor life decisions, wrote, “Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most.”

As part of the multi-paragraph post, Swift officially announced, “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election”—a decision she said she made in light of Harris being a “steady-handed, gifted leader” and Walz “standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body.”

And yet, as a recent YouGov poll revealed, that did not appear to sway the minds and hearts of very many. In fact, Swift encouraged her Instagram followers to do their own research and make their own choices, and it seems they are doing just that—independent of Swift’s opinion, for that matter.

According to the survey, which polled 1,120 potential voters Sept. 11-12, 66% of the respondents felt Swift’s public endorsement made no difference in how they would vote. Eight percent—made up of females registered as Democrats—said it made them “somewhat” or “much more likely” to vote for Harris. But notably, 20% said Swift’s post made them “somewhat” or “much less likely” to cast a vote for the Democrat.

Additionally, a plurality of those polled, 41%, said Swift should “not speak publicly about politics,” as opposed to the 38% who said she should, and 21% who were unsure. Very few felt Swift’s endorsement would have a negative effect on the Harris campaign, while the majority, 32%, believed it would have a positive impact. And this was true despite the fact that 66% of those surveyed did not consider themselves fans of the singer. 

A similar story unfolded in 2018 when Swift decided to endorse Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s (R-Tenn.) opponent, Phil Bredesen, the former governor of Tennessee. The performer reportedly had been “reluctant” to engage in the political arena earlier in her career, but noted that at the time, “due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now.” However, similar to her recent endorsement, it had very little impact, with only 11.7% of surveyed voters saying it “made them more likely to vote for Bredesen.” Blackburn ended up winning that Tennessee election, 54.7% to 43.9%.

Experts at that time noted that “celebrities don’t really have these huge overall game-changing effects” in terms of elections, and “we shouldn’t expect them to.” But that hasn’t stopped Americans from speaking their minds.

Outside of the YouGov survey and inside the world of social media, one user posted, “If you’re old enough to vote, a celebrity endorsement shouldn’t have any effect. Voters need to look at issues not multimillionaires with no world experiences.”

In some cases, moms have posted videos about selling their Taylor Swift concert tickets originally intended for their daughters. And several others have hopped on the “I hate Taylor Swift” trend on X, in which users have been sharing their grievances with both the singer’s announcement and her music at large—a movement being countered by the “I love Taylor Swift” crowd.

The Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm shared with The Washington Stand not merely what Swift’s endorsement or the resulting poll data means, but what Christians specifically can take away from current events. First, he stated, “Celebrities have the same right to speak their mind as everyone else.” And given America’s First Amendment rights, “no one should feel like they aren’t free to say what they think.”

And while there’s “a lot of evidence [celebrities] don’t make a meaningful difference” in elections, “it’s the most natural thing in the world to be influenced by the people around us,” he pointed out, and it’s “probably unavoidable.” It’s not our responsibility to stop celebrities from sharing their opinions, Backholm said, but “the trick is being aware of who is influencing us and the direction they’re pulling us in.”

For believers, Backholm emphasized, “A key to the Christian life is knowing what voices we should listen to and what voices we [should] ignore,” because “the fact that there will be voices is just a reality of life.” As humans, “We tend to listen to the people we admire or want to be admired by,” which means “we have to make sure the people we esteem are worthy of it in a biblical sense.”

“In voting,” he continued, “as in every decision in life, we should be most interested in God’s opinion” above all else. Because even though “He doesn’t formally make endorsements, He has given us instructions about how to evaluate leadership and the kinds of character traits we should value.” Ultimately, “Scripture also helps us understand what choices will bring blessing, security, and prosperity and what kind of choices will lead to pain.”

“Unless we are more concerned with God’s opinion than the opinion of a celebrity or our social circle,” Backholm concluded, “we will be easily deceived and manipulated.”

Originally published by The Washington Stand

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