The Imaginary Voting Plot: Memes are for Morons
This is one of the memes you should NOT take at face value. This is how lies can be disguised as statistics.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau Los Angeles County has 10,105,518 people living there. According to Mr. Kirk of the “Turning Point USA” group the county has 118% of them registered to vote. That would require 11,924,511 registered voters. In fact, the Secretary of State shows Los Angeles had 5,280,658 registered voters in the 2016 election. Mr. Kirk’s claim about Los Angeles is false.
Of those 5.27m voters in Los Angeles, in 2016 only 3.4 million voted in the presidential race.
According to the Census Bureau the population of San Diego County is 3,095,349. According to Kirk’s imaginative meme 138% of them are registered to vote. That would be 4.27m of them. The Secretary of State reports total registered voters in San Diego at 1,741,707 — which is no where near 138% of the population.
According to San Diego election results 1,346,513 voters turned out, that’s 43% of the population. None of these figures back up Kirk’s false claims.
His final falsehood is the claim that California has 1,735,556 more votes than they have citizens. According to the voting records there are 25.2m registered voters in the state. According to the Census Bureau there are 39,5m residents in the state. In the presidential race a total of 14.1m votes were cast.
Mr Kirk would have you believe some 41.5 million votes were cast and that how Democrats are supposedly stealing the state. Something I’ve never seen while living here. But 41.5 million didn’t vote. And while in 2016 new records were set, the total turn out was just over 14m votes.
Now Kirk likes to play the immigration card. He said the total votes in California exceed the total number of “citizens” by 1.7 million. He doesn’t clarify what he means by citizens but lets take him literally. We already saw if by citizens he meant residents he was fibbing, so what if we spoke of only actual US citizens.
According to the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation about 13% of all residents in California are non-citizens, while 87% are citizens. That would mean the number of “citizens” in the state is approximately 34.4m. And for Mr. Kirk to be telling the truth that the total votes cast exceeded the number of “citizens” by 1.7m minimum it would require a vote total of over 36 million. In reality there were only 14 million votes cast.
None of Kirk’s claims are honest or factual. They are all invented out of think air. Kirk’s final claim is “California has voted Blue for decades.” Even that isn’t true. Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected state wide as governor and left office in 2011, 9 years ago. Decades implies at least 20 years. In the case of the governor’s race well under that.
The Republican Party changed and that is why it started losing California. It is now a party of Christian fundamentalism and in the more secular atmosphere of California that doesn’t hold over. It is anti-immigrant and California has always had a large Hispanic population — after all it used to be part of Mexico. Californians tend to be tolerant and not party to anti-gay, anti-black, anti-immigrant rhetoric. That is why they shun the Republican Party. In fact, even the Republican stronghold of Orange County fell to the Democrats with Trump on the ballot. That’s why California doesn’t vote Republican anymore, not some imaginary conspiracy of non-existent voters stuffing ballot boxes.
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