Saturday, March 10, 2012

MIT and Numbers

In a recent post by the MIT News group the author quotes a speaker at an MIT conference as follows:

“There is a huge disenfranchisement going on, due to our voting laws,” .... said. “And I think to fight that we have to build a conversation with Latino leaders, because we’re both being disenfranchised.” .... students, he noted, have found in studies that in Los Angeles, Miami and New York, “at least 30 percent of the taxpaying adult voting-age population can’t vote because of immigrant status. If you add in ex-felons who can’t vote … you’re at nearly 50 percent of the [urban] population.”

Now if I do a back of the envelope calculation what is being said is as follows:

1. Take New York City...

2. The 30% of the voting age population is an illegal alien

3. 20% of the voting population is a convicted felon.

Yikes, that means that every other person is either a convicted felon or illegal! I have lived here for 70 years, yes I know of a few convicted felons, a few, and I grew up on Staten Island, home to the Genovese family, nice folks but some convicted felons amongst them, and my father and grandfather were police officers, but 20%, that means in an 8 million population we have with us 1.6 million felons! It just does not add up. We just do not have that many prisons. As for illegals, that would be 2.4 million, and there I have another problem. 200,000, maybe 500,000 but not 2.4 million! Where do these numbers come from? And this is MIT, and an MIT Press Release. Would someone at MIT check the facts?