Reply #126: The number was probably less than that...

[AP]

They based their conclusion on whether they thought a signature on a INS doc looked liked a sig on a voter reg card and no further investigation.

And the point that remains is that you can have a system that reduces to 0 the possiblity that illegal aliens will vote, but the closer you get to zero, the more likely you're going to make it prohibitively difficult for legal voters to vote.

You have to be a real strict father moralist to care more about keepign out illegals than you do about making sure eligible voters can vote.


If the Majority had executed its analysis as thoroughly and exhaustively as its counsel claimed in his testimony, using an analytical protocol whose main steps included first keying into their database all the hand-written naturalization data that the INS provided to the Committee over the course of 8 months, second determining if the newly entered naturalization dates were subsequent to November 5, 1996, and third establishing a probable signature match between a suspect voter's registration signature and the INS signature associated with an individual who naturalized after the election, they would have discovered that only a fraction of the people on the Majority list who voted on November 5, 1996 may have been non-citizens at the time they voted.

We use the word may quite deliberately here because short of an actual face-to-face interview with the suspect voter, nothing can be concluded about a suspect's citizenship status and right to vote in the State of California from all the materials the Majority demanded from Orange County and INS. Even probable signature matches between Orange County registration ballots and INS records, which the Minority used to reach its estimate, while perhaps the most reliable indication of a match, do not constitute proof because of the often poor condition of the photocopied signatures received from the two agencies, the absence of a forensic hand-writing expert to certify what may be a match, and other related factors.

The Minority cannot emphasize enough that it no more condones or minimizes the gravity of proven cases of `illegal non-citizens' voting than the Majority does, be it 500 such cases, 100, or 1. The fact remains, however, that nothing in the process conducted by the Majority proves widespread voter/registration fraud, and certainly nothing coming close to the 748 votes they claim contributed to Congresswoman Sanchez's victory. Furthermore, the Majority grossly mischaracterizes and slanders Ms. Sanchez's election by suggesting that the `illegal' votes they have identified came out of her margin of victory. We do not know for whom any `suspect' voters voted. The Majority cannot present a shred of evidence that would support such an irresponsible characterization.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&db_id=cp105&r_n=hr416.105&sel=TOC_205758&