Exactly how many votes is Russia alleged to have cast in the 2016 elections?  I believe that the number is zero.

Exactly how many votes have citizens of Mexico and Central America cast in the 2016 elections?  We don't know the exact number, but we know that it is much more than zero.

A 2014 study in the online Electoral Studies Journal shows that in the 2008 and 2010 elections, illegal immigrant [sic; should be "aliens" –ed.] votes were in fact quite high.

"We find that some noncitizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and congressional elections," wrote Jesse T. Richman [and] Gulshan A. Chattha, both of Old Dominion University, and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

More specifically, they write, "Noncitizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress."

Specifically, the authors say that illegals may have cast as many as 2.8 million votes in 2008 and 2010.  That's a lot of votes.  And when you consider [that] the population of illegal inhabitants has only grown since then, it's not unreasonable to suppose that their vote has, too.

So why is Russia getting all the attention?  Russia, at worst, operated a small-scale propaganda campaign on places like Twitter and Facebook before the election.  The amount of propaganda it disseminated was far, far less than 1% of the liberal propaganda put out daily by The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and many others who said Trump is a racist, Trump hates women, Trump hates poor people, etc.  So Russian "interference" was basically negligible.

Yet you wouldn't know that from reading the headlines.

Russia is using fake accounts on social media – many of them bots – to spread disinformation, the officials said.  European elections are being targeted, too, and the attacks were not likely to end this year, they warned.

"We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople[,] and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States," Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee at its annual hearing on worldwide threats.

Oh, no – bots are spreading disinformation!  Let me know when these bots produce 1% of the disinformation produced by The New York Times on a daily basis.

Trump initially tried to investigate real interference in our elections.  He set up a commission to investigate voter fraud chaired by Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach.  But when the liberal media cried that the commission was all about voter suppression, Trump folded like a cheap umbrella.  He shut down the commission before it could complete its research into what is probably massive voter fraud on the part of Mexican and other foreign nationals.

And so Republicans have accepted Democratic talking points.  They talk only about Russian "interference" and are so cowed that they won't talk about illegal aliens voting.  That's why we hear only about Russia, Russia, Russia, because like so many political topics – amnesty for illegal aliens, attempting to redefine marriage, boys in girls' bathrooms – Republicans are afraid to speak out.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.