Just five days before the 2016 election, the actress Gina Rodriguez conducted a short interview with then-President Barack Obama for the young Latino news site MiTu.
“Many of the millennials, DREAMers, undocumented citizens — and I call them citizens, because they contribute to this country — are fearful of voting,” Rodriguez said. “So, if I vote, will immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us?”
“Not true,” said Obama. “When you vote, you are a citizen yourself; there is not a situation somehow where the voting rolls are transferred over and people start investigating, etc. The sanctity of the vote is strictly confidential. If you have a family member who maybe is undocumented, then you have an even greater reason to vote.”
“This has been a huge fear presented, especially during this election,” Rodriguez said.
“And the reason that fear is promoted is because they don’t want people voting,” Obama said. “People are discouraged from voting, and part of what is important for Latino citizens is to make your voice heard, because you’re not just speaking for yourself. You’re speaking for family members, friends, classmates of yours in school who may not have a voice. Who can’t legally vote.”
The video, which got a strong but not viral 292,170 views, did not make many headlines — except on the right. The day after it ran, Fox Business host Neil Cavuto devoted several segments to a shortened version of the clip, which cut out when Obama said that the vote was “strictly confidential,” before the president made clear he was referring to someone with a noncitizen family member.
“I can’t believe how blithely the president of the United States, the ultimate keeper of our Constitution and all the rights that come with it — including the right to vote, legal citizens having the right to vote — blithely dismissing that,” Cavuto said.
“Shocking, absolutely shocking,” former Arizona governor Jan Brewer, a Republican, told Cavuto. “His comments in response to her were above the believability line. He should have absolutely set her straight that if you’re not a citizen, you don’t get to vote.”
Fox Business host Charles Payne ran a similar segment a day later, with the same edit. “In the top 10 states where illegal immigrants are the bulk of workers, seven of them are Democratic,” he warned, before asking his guests how many illegal voters the president was encouraging.
The story was false, but it matriculated across Fox News and sites like WorldNetDaily, the Drudge Report, InfoWars and GatewayPundit.
Some conservative news sites debunked the story. At HotAir, Larry O’Connor gave readers a rundown of the controversy and suggested that the president could have said more clearly that noncitizens should stay away from the polls.
But since President Trump began raising questions about voter fraud, the sliced-up version of the Obama quote has resurfaced. In a story today, the Washington Times used that quote to argue that Obama had been slippery on the question of illegal votes and said that “some conservatives interpreted Mr. Obama’s answer as a go-ahead signal.” There’s no evidence of that, especially from an interview that aired only on YouTube after tens of millions of voters had cast early ballots — an interview that sent a “signal” only if viewers watched the deceptively edited version.
Elsewhere in that story, the Times extrapolates from the work of Jesse Richman, an academic at Old Dominion University, to suggest that “6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November.” Richman’s work caused shock waves in 2014, when he wrote about it for The Washington Post and suggested that illegal votes might have won North Carolina for Obama in 2008.
But as The Post has noted, that research was largely debunked by other researchers. Richman’s calculation was based on the fact that five of 23,800 participants in the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study said they had voted but were not citizens. The CCES’s own researchers noted that a number that small might have been produced by simple human error.