You’ll probably be hearing more about this in the coming weeks, but Pennsylvania election officials have revealed that “hundreds” of non-citizen immigrants may have voted in various elections over the past sixteen years. What they’re revealing isn’t exactly the entire story though, as we’ll get to in a moment. But even the fact that they’ve come up with this many is yet another sign that concerns over voter fraud (which is still assumed to be fictional by Democrats) should be taken seriously and fully investigated. (Associated Press)

Noncitizen immigrants may have cast 544 ballots illegally out of more than 93 million ballots in elections spanning 18 years in Pennsylvania, state election officials said Wednesday.

A Department of State official, Jonathan Marks, told the House State Government Committee that the agency’s analysis covered 35 primary and general elections from 2000 through 2017. The number of possibly illegal ballots comes to one in every 172,000.

The illegal ballots were apparently cast by noncitizen immigrants who later reported themselves as having mistakenly registered, the department said. The figure could drop as the department continues to analyze information it gets from counties, a spokeswoman said later.

I’m not sure who’s approving the copy for Marc Levy at the AP, but this is one of the more strangely crafted news blurbs I’ve come across in recent memory. He couldn’t finish the first sentence of the lede without stressing that that total number of ballots cast over the period of study was astronomical. By the end of the third sentence the reporter is breaking out the gozinta tables from elementary school math to demonstrate the tiny percentage of ballots involved.

Pardon me if pointing this out sounds a bit rude, but isn’t the real story here the fact that people who aren’t citizens have been voting for most of the last two decades? Doesn’t that merit some sort of concern on the part of the readers rather than expending half of your initial copy in an effort to minimize this news and chuck it into the nothing to see here, move along basket?

It’s also worth noting that while the AP coverage mentions that the total number of illegal ballots “could drop” as the investigation continues, we’re clearly not talking about the actual total numbers either. These were the ballots cast by people who later reported themselves. How about the folks who didn’t make that conscientious move?

The fact that this is happening is being blamed on, “a glitch in the design of Pennsylvania’s electronic driver’s licensing system.” That’s the motor voter system, for those of you who have been keeping track. Precisely what the “glitch” is remains a mystery, but they’re supposedly correcting it. There have been plenty of people raising concerns over motor voter registration for a while now and this is precisely one of the scenarios which were highlighted as being possible. And just for the record, Pennsylvania has been using that system since 1995.

Apologists for these programs will be quick to latch on to the small numbers repeatedly stressed in this article, but let’s keep in mind that this is only one category of improper voter registration. The people involved here are ostensibly legal immigrants who were obtaining drivers licenses and identification cards and were mistakenly registered. What about the booming business of black market, fake ID documents out there? (And yes, it’s a massive market.) Once you have one of those in your possession all sorts of opportunities open up, even if you’re an illegal alien.

More digging is required before this story heads down the memory hole. This is far more likely to be the tip of the iceberg than some statistically insignificant aberration.