Hispanic Voters: Undercounted Or...Fraudulent?
11/04/2010
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Steve Sailer is working on his election analysis and we hope to publish it tomorrow night. But meanwhile FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver reports that Matt Bareto of the polling firm Latino Decisions has a theory why polls over-predicted the Republican vote, especially in Nevada:
"There is one overarching reason why the polls were wrong in Nevada," Mr. Barreto wrote in an e-mail to FiveThirtyEight. "The Latino vote."

His firm, which conducts interviews in both English and Spanish, had found that Latino voters — somewhat against the conventional wisdom — were relatively engaged by this election and for the most part were going to vote Democratic. Mr. Barreto also found that Latino voters who prefer to speak Spanish — about 40 percent of Latino voters in California meet this description, he told me — are particularly likely to vote Democratic. Pollsters who don’t conduct bilingual interviewing at all, or who make it cumbersome for the respondent to take the poll in Spanish, may be missing these voters.

My reaction to this: a resounding Hmmmmmmmm. Isn't speaking English a condition of citizenship? Who are these voters who "prefer to speak Spanish" so strongly that they won't (or can't) answer simple poll questions in English? Could some possibly be...illegal aliens?

The blogosphere is already rife with rumors of fraud in Nevada and elsewhere. Not, of course, the MSM—but you didn't read about the Tea Parties there first either.

Interestingly, one patriotic immigration reform candidate, Kris Kobach, who helped write SB1070, made voter fraud, especially by illegal immigrants, a key issue in his victorious campaign for Kansas secretary of state.

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