EPISODE 106: Illegal Voting and the 2020 Election with Jim Agresti

Episode 106:  Illegal Voting and the 2020 Election

Bill Walton:                   00:07                Welcome to The Bill Walton Show. Well, the election madness continues. We have Dominion voting machines. We have mail-in ballots that are being counted weeks after the election’s over. We have incidents of ballot stuffing all over. And now we have yet another interesting piece of the story, which is illegal voting by noncitizens. And the story has been reported out by Jim Agresti, who is the founder and CEO of Just Facts, which I highly recommend for you all to go to to listen or read about what’s really going on with a highly sophisticated analysis buttressed by all sorts of footnotes and real world analysis. And Jim is just great, and I’ve got Jim with me today.

The chapter of the story we want to report on now is USA Today came out with this really incredibly bogus fact-checking story. I put that in quotes, which is just false in the extreme, and the kicker is that USA Today is being supported by Facebook. So we’ve got the usual cast of characters in this story and all aspects of the election issues. Jim, welcome.

Jim Agresti:                   01:33                Bill, great to be back with you.

Bill Walton:                   01:36                I guess this is our third show together and the way the world is going, we’re going to have plenty of opportunities to talk about lots of things. So first, let’s talk about your initial analysis. What did you learn and what should we now?

Jim Agresti:                   01:53                Sure. So we have scientific surveys conducted during previous elections that revealed that roughly 13 to 15% of noncitizens who are not legally allowed to vote in federal elections were in fact registered to vote. Moreover, one particular, actually two particular analysis matched some of this data with voting records and found that approximately double that amount were actually registered to vote because a lot of noncitizens realize that’s illegal and are not willing to own up to it. So we have a good array of data in the form of three scientific surveys. And we also have data from those surveys, two surveys, not three, but two showing that a certain proportion of them do vote. And that this is about 16%. It’s a rough average.

There’s some error bars on that number, which we integrate in our study. But basically what we did is we took that data from previous elections and we looked at the current election and we applied it to the number of noncitizens living in the battleground states. And what we found based upon those populations, and also the way that noncitizens vote, which are approximately 80% for the Democratic presidential candidate and 20% for the Republican, that these votes that are baked into virtually every federal election were enough to secure a margin of victory for Joe Biden in a bare minimum of two battleground states, which would bring president Trump 11 electoral votes shy for winning the presidency and enough actually to overturn the entire presidential race at the time we conducted this study, which is about five days after the election.

Bill Walton:                   03:47                So you looked at Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. And you just said something, I just want to make sure we’ve run into the ground. You said 80% of noncitizens tend to vote Democrat, vote for Biden. What’s the source for that 80%?

Jim Agresti:                   04:07                This was a study published in 2014 by the Journal of Electoral Studies, it’s a peer review journal. The research was written by two university professors as well as an undergrad, not an undergrad, a graduate student. And this is based upon their own self admitted answers to these questions. Who did you vote for in the 2008 election, is I believe where the original data came from. And 80% said Barack Obama, 20% said John McCain. I’m rounding, and all the figures I’ll give you today are rounded figures just to make the conversation flow better. But that is where those figures come from and they’re in alignment with what we see from the respective parties, their platforms, and their candidates.

Donald Trump campaigns strongly against limiting and preventing illegal immigration. Joe Biden is one saying, “Hey, we’ll give you amnesty. We’ll give you free healthcare. We’ll do all these things for you.” So these voting figures are not only directly from what they’ve told pollsters in the past, but also based upon what you see in terms of policy that the different candidates are proposing and promising.

Bill Walton:                   05:25                How tough is it for a noncitizen to vote?

Jim Agresti:                   05:28                Well, it’s not that tough at all. It makes it a federal felony by the way to vote if you’re a noncitizen. It is a federal felony, but it’s one of these things that are never enforced or very rarely enforced. So there is not a single state in this country that forces voters to provide evidence of citizenship in order to register to vote. I want you to think about that. Not a single state. Now, a couple of states have tried, but they were blocked by court rulings and illegal lawsuits brought and endorsed by the Obama administration. So there’s very little effective control on actually ensuring that the person who registered to vote is in fact a US citizen.

Bill Walton:                   06:17                Wow, not a single state.

Jim Agresti:                   06:19                Not a single state. And by the way, Bill, earlier on you kind of referenced the documentation we put into our work. And if you go to our article at justfactsdaily.com, you will find links to highly credible primary sources, directly to lawsuits, directly to court rulings, directly to the Federal Election Commission, Election Assistance Commission. These are not things I’m saying without first having thoroughly, thoroughly vetted them.

Bill Walton:                   06:50                So get on the website, justfacts.com if you want to look at that, where listen to this, that’s got all the [crosstalk 00:06:56].

Jim Agresti:                   06:57                It’s justfactsdaily.com, that’s our fact check site.

Bill Walton:                   07:02                Justfactsdaily.com. Okay, I’ve got that. Now you had a couple of people who were highly qualified vet your research. Tell me about their backgrounds.

Jim Agresti:                   07:11                Sure. So just to make sure we were doing things correctly, I reached out to two PhD scholars who specialize in data analytics, and I asked them the critically review the study and provide me feedback on it. And they came back with very positive assessments of the study. One of them actually did find a mathematical error in the way we calculated our margins of error. And we fixed that before we published it. So it was a very helpful peer review process. And one of these individuals is a PhD mathematician. He’s a scientific and quantitative researcher, his name’s Michael Cook. Another one is Dr. Andrew Glenn, and he’s a professor emeritus of operations research from West Point, the US Military Academy. And he is an award-winning researcher in the field of computational probability.

And he has a PhD in operations research, which a lot of people might not know this, but it’s an interdisciplinary PhD. It enables people to look at complex situations that involve a lot of different variables melding from different academic fields and bring them together in a coherent factual matter, which is exactly what we’re doing with the study. So I selected these individuals, first of all, because I had relationships and rapport with them. I knew I could trust them and that they’d be receptive to this. But secondly, because they had the kind of expertise that could prove this right or wrong.

Bill Walton:                   08:36                Well, I’m smiling because it seems like we have our scientists and they have their scientists. And I did a show with Dr. Jay Richards, who’s got a PhD and he coauthored it with a couple other, Bill Briggs and another fellow who’s also got a PhD about the longterm cost of the lockdowns. And you and I did a show on that six months ago. Anyway, they like you had done rigorous research, done a lot of statistical analysis and figured out that the cost of lockdowns was 50, 60 times greater than the benefits of the lockdowns, which I seem to recollect Jim Agresti told me in March or April of this year. But that, YouTube pulled it, and then we had another site. What was the other site that pulled it?

Vimeo pulled it because it was not supporting the narrative. So you joined the fight. Now it turns out that YouTube put the video back up with Jay Richards two days after the election. Now, why would they do that? Anyway, let’s go on to your story. And then the next chapter is USA Today shows up with a story November 24th, no, I think it was the day… What was the date of that one? Anyway, just last week, right? That they fact-checked it and they claim that the voting noncitizens affected 2020 elections is unverified. Talk about that.

Jim Agresti:                   10:12                Yeah. They even used a stronger word, it’s unfounded, which I think is more than unverified.

Bill Walton:                   10:18                Oh yeah.

Jim Agresti:                   10:18                There’s no real basis to it, which is insane because we were extremely transparent and documented every fact that it held. And this fact-checker came along and basically went about impugning the credentials of the scholars that we had vet our study, and then proceeded to dismiss all of the factual material on our study based on nothing more than the unsubstantiated claims of progressive lawyers. He once said, “Well, these scholars are not election experts.” Let me tell you what my election experts tell me. And Bill, you mentioned we have our scientists and they have theirs. This is not one of those cases. There’s a difference between science is not the opinion of scientists. It’s actually the factual evidence to show something is happening or not happening in the material world.

And our research is back to the health with that kind of evidence. The scholars I brought in were not to provide that evidence just to make sure that I hadn’t mishandled or missed some of that evidence. So what she’s doing is basically taking two lawyers from progressive activist voting groups, and they’re saying, “Well, none of this is true.” And basically taking their word in which they present no facts. And she presents virtually no facts in her article to actually substantiate her word. And then she made statements like, “Agresti argues,” in place of about a dozen documented credible facts that I present. And she dismisses all that with, “Agresti argues, and this other guy says this. And this guy you can trust because he’s an election expert and because I picked him.”

Bill Walton:                   12:11                So did USA Today have traction?

Jim Agresti:                   12:16                I don’t know. I didn’t see it get published very widely. And I did reply to them. And I sent an email, and I’m waiting back to hear from them. And I did not only reply to the author, but also their corrections desk because there are, as I pointed out in my response to them, at least 10 outright falsehoods or misleading claims in this fact check that some of them are so straightforward and ridiculous that there’s no argument over what the truth is here. It’s just that the USA Today totally spurn the truth in favor of a narrative.

Bill Walton:                   12:56                Well, and then what they say, they claim voter turnout from noncitizens affected by the popular vote in battleground states is plausible but unproven. Voting in federal elections is reserved for US citizens and few noncitizens knowingly register to vote. Just Fact Daily’s research into how many noncitizens could have voted realize an unverifiable estimates. Well, that’s just not true.

Jim Agresti:                   13:21                No, it’s not. Of course there are some assumptions built into what we’re doing. We’re assuming that the registration rates and the voting turnouts of noncitizens have stayed relatively stable over time. We present data from 2008, 2012, and 2013 to show that it has stayed relatively stable over that time. But we’re saying, well, it’s probably about the same in 2020, we make this clear throughout the article. So we’re not saying, “Hey, we have concrete proof of this.” We’re saying we have strong empirical evidence of this. And there’s a difference and we’re clear about it.

Bill Walton:                   14:02                If you took just this alone, this voting by noncitizens, you believe that if the middle range of your estimates about the number of people not voting and assuming 80% voted for Biden, you believe that Trump would have won the Electoral College.

Jim Agresti:                   14:20                At the time we published the article, it was only the case on the higher end estimates. In other words, within the error bands, would that be true? So this type of fraud, which I emphasize is only one type of fraud, would be enough to overturn two states and bring Trump to 259 electoral votes. Now, since then, there’s been more votes counted. And now even on the higher end, it’s not enough to give Trump an Electoral College victory. It’s still enough, whether it’s at the low end of our estimates or the high end of the estimates to move Arizona and Georgia into Trump’s column and thereby giving him 259 electoral votes.

Bill Walton:                   15:02                So then we have Pennsylvania or wherever else they would decide the election. Has the campaign taken this up in any way or is anybody running with this in the White House or elsewhere?

Jim Agresti:                   15:18                Not to my knowledge, not in any political circles. I’ve heard from True the Vote and they’re very interested in this and are using it for their analysis. But in so far as politicians, I have not seen any evidence that they are pursuing this, which is ironic because Trump had a voter election integrity commission a couple of years back. And it shut down in less than a year because the states would not turn over public voting data to them that they would need to complete an analysis to check into this kind of fraud. So after lawsuits and basically the states putting up a lot of walls in the way of them doing this, they closed the commission.

Now the president is in a situation where he has legal standing or personal stake in the outcome of the matter. And I would think that a court would be very prone to say, “You have to turn over this data.” This is not non-public data, it’s public data that they just refuse to give to them in a format that can be used to do a real thorough analysis.

Bill Walton:                   16:25                Did you get a retraction from USA Today?

Jim Agresti:                   16:28                I am waiting. And by the way, Bill, you mentioned Facebook, how Facebook is funding this effort. Facebook then turned around and used this USA Today fact-check to remove, excuse me, not remove, to limit the distribution of our article, our research on this. Again, I want you to think about, you have a PhD vetted study that is documented to the health. You have a USA Today fact-checker come in with money from Facebook and say, “These two progressive lawyers say no,” that’s almost the entire extent of their evidence. Based on that, Facebook limits distribution on our posts, puts a notice on it saying, “Hey, this is questionable material.”

And then also lets us know, “We’re counting this as a page quality violation against your organization, Just Facts.” So we put out facts, these fact-checkers put out essentially partisan propaganda and Facebook funds it and then uses that to censor our facts.

Bill Walton:                   17:31                So their phrase is, independent fact-checkers say this information is missing context and could mislead people. So the key three words in there are independent fact-checkers, that was not what we have here. We have progressive lawyers.

Jim Agresti:                   17:45                And by the way, independent fact-checkers, I don’t know if that’s a legal term or a public term for publicity purposes, these people are in no way independent. Facebook help fund this work. Facebook cherry picks these fact-checkers to be the arbiters of truth on their platform. And then they say, well, they’re independent. No, they’re not. Facebook picked them. And in this case, they’re funding them. They’re not independent.

Bill Walton:                   18:14                So USA Today, Facebook, have you done any more work on other types of voter fraud in this election or is this the main effort here?

Jim Agresti:                   18:27                Yeah. This is the only thing I’ve really covered in depth.

Bill Walton:                   18:31                Okay. Well, then in the meantime though, you’ve been busy. You moved from New Jersey to Texas, which seems to me it really proves how smart you are. You got out of [crosstalk 00:18:43]-

Jim Agresti:                   18:44                [crosstalk 00:18:44] but enjoying the weather, the people, everything about it has been wonderful thus far.

Bill Walton:                   18:50                Well, I think we’ve nailed this. This is just another example of people distorting really an honest effort to get at what really happened and then making claims from people who have a stake in the outcome. And by the way, in my knowing you for several years now, you don’t really do the partisan piece. You just try to weigh in at what you think is real and what isn’t real.

Jim Agresti:                   19:19                Yes. I’m clear about the fact that I am a conservative. I don’t play the media game of, well, I’m not going to tell you who I am. I feel that’s a portion of transparency that everybody who’s involved in this realm should let people know where they stand so they can judge for themselves where the information’s coming from. And by the way, the shame of non-partisanship that many of these media outlets try to put on, it disappears the moment you hear anything out of their mouth or read anything they publish. You can see they’re clearly partisans. All their errors always fall in one direction, which is to serve their agenda. Or maybe it’s too generous to call them errors. Maybe they’re outright wise. I don’t know. I can’t read their minds.

But I can tell you this, that the errors that our organization, Just Facts makes tend to be right down the middle. We’re not perfect, but I’ll tell you something, we don’t always error to the conservative side. Sometimes we error to the liberal side and in the rare cases where we have to correct something, it’s pretty evenly split.

Bill Walton:                   20:25                Well, I found you an incredible source of clarity. Just for our listeners and viewers, or listeners in this case, what else do you have on the justfactsdaily.com that would be pertinent to today’s issues?

Jim Agresti:                   20:40                So something that we did just before the election related to Biden’s hard drive and Joe Biden’s dealings in Ukraine. And this is one of those cases where the media was just so deceptive that if anyone was reading the New York Times or watching your evening news, you would walk away with a perception that it was the exact opposite of reality. The data, the facts that came from that hard drive and had been verified by people who were copied on some of this correspondence as authentic, yes, I received this text and this is what it said, are highly incriminating and show a pattern of criminal misconduct on the part of Joe Biden.

I would not say the word proof, but again, strong evidence that he used American taxpayer money to his political advantage, to his son’s advantage in a very corrupt and elicit manner.

Bill Walton:                   21:44                Jim, thank you. I’m going to encourage everybody to head over to your website, justfactsdaily.com. And it sounds like we’ve got a couple more things to follow up on our next show. And I want to thank you again for coming on and we will keep talking. So thank you, and thanks to you all for listening. We’d love to hear what you think. Let us know in Parler, Facebook, and Twitter and where you can find The Bill Walton Show. For previous episodes. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and of course, at thebillwaltonshow.com.

Speaker 3:                    22:23                Thanks for listening. Want more? Be sure to subscribe at thebillwaltonshow.com or on iTunes.