By Cliff Kincaid

It was the issue the presidential candidates and the major media didn't want to talk about -- immigration. And yet immigrants, many of them illegal, may have provided Al Gore with millions of votes on November 7th. Indeed, Gore was the administration official who engineered the fraudulent "Citizenship USA" program that brought illegal aliens with criminal backgrounds and potential terrorists into the U.S. as citizens.

In his book, Sell Out, David Schippers says, "The program was placed under the direction of Vice President Al Gore...He was responsible for keeping the pressure on, to make sure the aliens were pushed through by September, [1996], the last day to register for the presidential election." Under the law, only qualified immigrants with no significant criminal history may be admitted. But Schippers found more than 75,000 new citizens had arrest records when they applied for citizenship. Another 176,000 citizens did not have their fingerprints checked for criminal records.
A Congressional investigation of the scandal disclosed the following:

• Hillary Rodham Clinton was involved in discussions on how liberal groups could facilitate the process of making aliens into citizens.
• Al Gore and his staff were involved in discussions on how to "produce a million new citizens before election day," and President Clinton was reported to have said he "wants action."
• One option for President Clinton was to order "lower" standards for U.S. citizenship, so they could be made "more liberal."
• That Immigration and Naturalization Service director Doris Meissner warned that the campaign could be perceived to be "a pro-Democrat voter mill."

In terms of the 2000 election results in Florida, the carefully cultivated media image of Jewish ladies mistakenly voting for Pat Buchanan is a fraud. The real story is that thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of illiterate non-English-speaking non-citizens were herded to the polls to vote for Al Gore. The process of recounting ballots doesn't determine whether the votes were valid, or whether they were cast by American citizens who were registered voters. It may only show how some of them were not competent enough to cast a vote.

At this stage, there is no compelling reason to go forward with manual recounts in Florida. The Gore campaign has produced no evidence of voter fraud by the GOP because it knows that it benefited from voter fraud. This kind of fraud can only be exposed by analyzing whether the people who registered and voted actually exist or are citizens. Manual recounts do not determine fraud; they only enable partisan election officials to manipulate the votes that were cast, including those cast by non-citizens.A fair, honest and accurate count of legal votes could show that Bush carried Florida by hundreds of thousands of votes, and carried the national popular vote by millions.

Nationally, it is estimated by Edward Nelson, president of U.S. Border Control (USBC), that 2-4 percent of all votes were cast by non-citizens, and that, in certain Florida areas, such as Dade County, it may have hit 10-15 percent. Figures from the Florida Department of state show that from 1994 to 1998, the number of "other race" registered voters -- that is, primarily Hispanic -- went from just under 100,000 to 655,000. That's an increase of about 600 percent. But white registration increased by only 12 percent, and black registration by 40 percent. In Broward County, the number of "other race" or largely Hispanic voters went from 9,888 to 52,246. "That means," says USBC legal counsel William J. Olson, "for every white or black that went into register during that four year period, there were 28 Hispanics who went in to register."

Nelson points out that no one knows how many of the 550,000 "other race" voters were newly naturalized citizens under the "Citizenship USA" program. But we do know that one of the cities targeted in the program was Miami, Florida. "On the other hand," Nelson says, "no one knows how many of these same voters are not citizens at all, but non-citizens and even illegal aliens who were nevertheless invited to register to vote by Florida motor vehicle and welfare state employees doing what they were required to do under the federal Motor Voter law."

When the 1993 national motor voter bill was passed, concern was expressed that it would facilitate fraud on a national basis. Under this law, officially called the National Voter Registration Act, people can register to vote by mail in federal elections.The web site of the League of Women Voters puts it this way: "Register to vote! It's easier than ever before." These mail-in voter registration forms can be also picked up at almost any government welfare or motor vehicle office. All that a person has to do is provide a name and an address. The name can be fake and the address can be a post office box. The process is so easy that you don't even need to be an American citizen to register and vote. Olson says, "The Clinton Administration told the states that if they specifically asked these people if they were citizens, that would be an assault on their civil rights." He adds, "There are only 3 states that bother to do a secondary check to see if the people who are registered are U.S. citizens."

The Bob Dornan-Loretta Sanchez congressional race of 1996 illustrated the problem. Sanchez officially won by just 979 votes, but a limited investigation determined that at least 748 of them were invalid, most cast by non-citizens. Fearful of appearing insensitive to Hispanics, Congressional Republicans failed to vigorously pursue the case, leaving Sanchez in office.

Congress passed the motor voter bill under tremendous Democratic party, liberal and media pressure. Congress was repeatedly told that the bill would simply only open up the democratic process to more people and that opponents of this approach were "racists" who wanted to restrict the vote to white well-to-do people.

Rep. Stephen Horn of California had the courage to introduce the Voter Eligibility Verification Act, designed to prevent non-citizens from registering to vote. The bill would allow election officials to request and send the name, date of birth and Social Security number of any potential voter to the Social Security Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to determine if they are truly citizens. Incredibly, Horn's common-sense approach passed only by a slim margin, 210-200, when it was brought to the House floor in 1997. However, it was brought to the floor under special procedures that required a two-thirds "yes" vote for passage. It was never brought up again.

In their book, Dirty Little Secrets, University of Virginia Professor Larry Sabato and Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn R. Simpson assert that between 2 million and 3.4 million "phony registrations" litter the voting rolls in California alone. In a CBS 60 Minutes story, correspondent Steve Kroft revealed that dogs and cats have been registered to vote in California. Some of the work that went into the story was done by a small newspaper, the Carmel Pine Cone of Carmel, California, which registered a fictitious person by mail and then solicited and received an absentee ballot. According to the paper, Kroft himself found it "amazing" that people can register and vote without showing any form of identification at all. Kroft also noted that the Los Angeles district attorney had launched a criminal investigation into registrations collected by two groups closely tied to the Democratic Party.

But like immigration, the issue of potential vote fraud never came up during the presidential campaign. Both issues can make conservatives look "insensitive" to minorities. But in their attempt to appear "inclusive" and less conservative, Republicans may have damaged turnout among their own base. Conservative columnist Sam Francis says GOP turnout in the 2000 election was lower than expected, and that Bush's muted conservative message was a factor.

A key flaw, Francis argues, was appealing to minority groups who don't vote Republican. Paul Gigot, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and Linda Chavez, a former Reagan official, figured that because Bush had gotten about 50 percent of the Hispanic vote in his runs for Texas governor, he might do equally well on the presidential level. But the results show that Bush only got about 33 percent of the Hispanic vote. This is more than what his father got in 1992, but about the same as Reagan. Sam Francis said this percentage had less to do with George W. Bush's strategy than with Clinton-Gore miscues, such as the handling of the Elian Gonzalez case.

Francis, who calls the GOP the "Stupid Party," says Bush also wasted his time appealing to blacks, who went 90 percent for Gore. Overwhelming white majorities for Bush nullified Gore's advantage among black voters. According to an article in the Washington Times, "In six states -- Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, south Carolina and Texas -- more than 70 percent of white voters went for Bush. In Mississippi, where blacks are 36 percent of the population, 81 percent of whites voted for Bush, giving him a 58 percent to 40 percent win. Bush won Tennessee and Virginia with 60 percent of the white vote in those states." Sam Francis said that Bush would have been better advised to get more white votes, rather than court minorities.

But because Bush tried to appeal to minorities, especially Hispanics, he refused to bring up the immigration issue, even though surveys show that 70-80 percent of the American people want less immigration. He also refused to bring up the issue of quotas and affirmative action. Hitting both issues aggressively may have augmented the Bush edge among white voters and carried the election for him, despite illegal voting on behalf of Gore.

Ideologically, the liberals won. While the final figures are not yet in, it appears that Gore and Nader combined got more votes than the more conservative candidates - Bush, Pat Buchanan and Howard Phillips. The Washington Post on November 3 had highlighted how liberals were "energized" over the election and were "mobilized...as never before in recent memory. spending more than $56 million, five times what they spent in 1996." Most of the money was spent on television ads in support of Al Gore.

Nevertheless, columnist Tony Snow noted that George W. Bush had sent out his top strategist, Karl Rove, to predict a 5-point, 320-electoral-vote win. Yet it appears that three out of every four undecided voters went to Al Gore during the final weekend of the campaign. Tony Snow himself believed the Bush propaganda. He had predicted that Bush would win by five points, and would beat Gore in electoral votes by 343 to 195. He also predicted hat Rick Lazio would beat Hillary Clinton in the New York Senate race.

To their detriment, the Republicans failed to confront the power of organize labor. By one estimate, the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions may have put $1 billion into the presidential and congressional campaigns, much of it spent on get-out-the-vote activities. The AFL-CIO held a post-election news conference which said that union households made up a record high 26 percent of voters, up from 23 percent in 1996 and 1998. Yet unions represent only 13.9 percent of workers in the U.S. The labor group said that union turnout was a key factor in several states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Washington.

Despite this propaganda assault, the AFL-CIO admits that 32 percent of its members voted for George W. Bush. However, their union dues went to support Al Gore.

 

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