Without voting, noncitizens could swing the election for Obama

By Leonard Steinhorn, Friday, October 5, 1:31 PM

If President Obama wins reelection by three or four Electoral College votes next month, the reason may be simple: noncitizens, mostly immigrants, who don’t have the right to vote. No, I’m not talking about his immigration policy or his popularity with Latinos. Nor does this have anything to do with voter fraud. Rather, an Obama victory could hinge on a quirk in the Constitution that gives noncitizens, a group that includes illegal immigrants and legal permanent residents, a say in electing the president of the United States.

As required by Article I and the Fourteenth Amendment, the decennial census, which allocates to each state its congressional seats and Electoral College votes, is based on a count of all people who live in the United States, citizens and noncitizens alike — or as the Constitution phrases it, “the whole number of persons in each state.” That means millions of noncitizens who are ineligible to vote are still included in Electoral College calculations, and that benefits some states over others. Most of these noncitizens are here legally; however the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that about 45 percent of noncitizens are undocumented immigrants.

In 2010 and most previous years, the census did not inquire about citizenship, but the American Community Survey (ACS), which samples our population every month, includes a breakdown of citizens and noncitizens. Plugging the 2010 ACS citizen-only numbers into the Census Bureau’s apportionment formula shows that five states benefit electorally from their noncitizen populations: New York, Florida and Washington each gain one congressional seat and thus one Electoral College vote; Texas gains two; and California — with 5,516,920 noncitizens out of a total population of 37,341,989 — gains five.

Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Montana each lose a seat under the official formula as compared with an apportionment that counts citizens only ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/without-voting-noncitizens-could-swing-the-election-for-obama/2012/10/05/b9d99be8-0be9-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story.html