Over the weekend, Drudge had a headline stating: “Report: 1,000+ Illegal Voters in Virginia.”  And Dan Sciavino, Jr. tweeted: “Terrible. We know who the 1,000+ illegal aliens ARE NOT VOTING FOR! A fixed presidential election in the making….will we ever know!?!?”

But if you look at the underlying report, they have identified only 31 actual non-citizen voters in Virginia over the last 10 years. No doubt there are some more, as not all the counties have responded yet. But it is not 1,000 plus non-citizens voting in Va.  (“In the 8 jurisdictions that provided us with lists of aliens recently removed from their voter rolls, we discovered that 31 non-citizens had cast a total of 186 votes between 2005 and 2015. The most alien votes were cast in 2012 followed by 2008, the year President Obama was elected to his first term.” (emphasis omitted))

Don’t believe all the hype.  Non-citizen voting is a real, but pretty small, problem (because the penalties are high and the payoff low).  We should still deal with the problem with universal voter registration conducted by the federal government and national voter id with optional thumb print, as I argued in my 2012 book, The Voting Wars.

But don’t expect non-citizens to steal the presidential election.