Democrats and their press allies are always yelling about voter fraud being a miniscule "actually very rare," practically non-existent thing, a figment of fevered conservative imaginations. But state election officials in Texas have uncovered a whopping 98,000 illegal voter registrations from non-citizens, with more than half - 58,000 - actually casting ballots. Seems the problem is bigger than was imagined, even -- on the right. The story is being covered by the mainstream press. WFAA, a big Texas radio station, had this:

About 95,000 non-citizens are registered to vote in Texas, and more than half of those have cast ballots in at least one election, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley announced on Friday.

Whitley's office, along with the Texas Department of Public Safety, had been investigating possible voter fraud for the last year, according to a news release. 

Of the 95,000 non-citizens registered, 58,000 have voted in one or more elections since 1996. 

The Secretary of State's office found those numbers by collecting current DPS data of people who have applied for a driver's license or state identification card in the last five years with a green card of visa. The investigators then cross-referenced that data with people who are registered to vote.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram had this, NBC News had this. Dallas Morning News had this.

Which pretty well puts paid to the Democratic 'talking point' about voter fraud being a non-issue. Actually, this finding, from Texas officials very determined to clean up their voter rolls, is a very big issue. Every ballot cast by a foreigner in the election cancels out the vote of an American citizen. When the elections are close, that's quite a disenfranchisement.

According to the Star-Telegram, citing a Texas official:

“Every single instance of illegal voting threatens democracy in our state and deprives individual Texans of their voice,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a prepared statement. “My Election Fraud Unit stands ready to investigate and prosecute crimes against the democratic process when needed.”

He's right. With elections increasingly close, the prospect of foreigners determining the outcome is a rather amazing sort of imperialism against Americans from abroad. And they are getting away with it, they've been getting away with it for more than two decades, as this study showed.

What else can we say about this? It exposes the Democrats and their abnormal obsession with keeping voter rolls unaudited, for the beneficiaries of non-citizens voting. Texas is a red state and red states have no stake in winning illegal votes, which go largely to Democrats. No wonder they yell about these revelations, which they are doing this time, but it's a pretty big tide they're protesting.

California, by contrast, is a solid blue one-party state, coinciding with its initiation of vast benefit packages for illegal immigrants. Not surprisingly, the state houses a quarter of the nation's illegal immigrants. And surprise, surprise, it leads the nation in resistence to voter roll audits, claiming illegal immigrants wouldn't dream of voting illegally here after they crossed into the U.S. illegally. California, which had to be sued into cleaning up its voter rolls, and not completely, continues to resist any effort to maintain the integrity of its vote.

Well, the Texas audit does signal there's a problem. And since Democrats cannot spin this away, though they are trying to by saying maybe all the non-citizen voters became citizens in the interim, they are mostly likely going to try to ignore this away and say it was done by Republicans.

One can only hope it won't work this time, because they've got big plans to make all of the nation's election laws exactly like California's. This is the death of democracy. Venezuela went this route, its failure wasn't just socialism imposed in one swoop, it started with voter fraud. All the more reason to make this report from Texas a major narrative shift in the national conversation.