A majority of EU member states, including Britain and Ireland, have voted to reform rules like EC Commission Regulation No 2257/94, which caused international ridicule by stating that all bananas must be "free of abnormal curvature" and at least 14 cm in length.

Imperfectly-shaped fruit and vegetables may now be back on supermarket shelves by 2009.

France, Italy, Spain and Greece opposed the reforms and were accused by officials of unfairly seeking to protect the interests of their farmers.

Mariann Fischer Boel, the European agriculture commissioner, has said that she also wants to scrap a swathe of regulations on produce such as onions, garlic, caulifower and spinach.

Speaking before the vote she said the rules were outdated and especially inappropriate at the time of a world food shortages.

She said: "In this era of high prices and growing demand, it makes no sense to throw (misshapen fruit and vegetables) away or destroy them. It shouldn't be the EU's job to regulate these things."

Under the present regulations, Class 1 cucumbers must be "practically straight" and be bent by a gradient of no more than 1/10.

Produce that does not meet the minimum standards can not at present be sold as second-class, meaning many edible items are thrown away by farmers.

On 29 July 2008, the European Commission held a preliminary vote concerning the repeal of certain regulations related to the quality of specific fruit and vegetables that included provisions related to size and shape. According to the Commission's press release, "In this era of high prices and growing demand, it makes no sense to throw these products away or destroy them." The Agriculture Commissioner stated, "This is a concrete example of our drive to cut red tape and I will continue to push until it goes through. [...] It shouldn't be the EU's job to regulate these things. It is far better to leave it to market operators." Regulation 1221/2008 took effect as of 1 July 2009. Though neither the press release cited above nor Regulation 1221/2008 made any mention of bananas or Regulation 2257/94, some reports of the changes treated them as including the banana quality standards regulation and contained explicit or apparent references to this regulation, using expressions such as "the infamous 'straight banana' ruling". Some sources have claimed this to be an admission that the original regulations did indeed ban "bent bananas", or that it was accepted that it was "a farce".

Attorney General Ken Paxton today announced that his office sent a letter to state Senator Bryan Hughes, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Election Integrity, announcing a significant voter fraud initiative and addressing key problems and policy areas related to election law. The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) also stands ready to assist Starr County District Attorney Omar Escobar in the fight against voter fraud, and fully supports his efforts to educate the countyâ(TM)s citizens on existing and amended voting laws.

The letter to Senator Hughes highlights the lack of safeguards in the voting system to detect ineligible voters, discusses additional potential measures to address to mail-in ballot fraud, and addresses the use of public funds for political activity. The letter also discusses a specific investigation of four counties where 165 unlawfully registered non-citizens had been removed from the voter rolls after casting 100 illegal votes in Texas elections in the last two years. The OAG also discovered that the legal process for removing ineligible voters who self-report is not being followed correctly, if at all, in various counties. Several investigations into ineligible voting and voter fraud are ongoing.

A memo from a liberal-leaning advocacy group warning Democrats that they could fail in the 2018 midterm races if they can't strike a deal to protect "Dreamer" children of undocumented immigrants has conservatives accusing the party of playing politics with the lives of migrants.

The memo from Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clintonâ(TM)s former top aide and executive vice president for communications and advocacy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, called on Democrats to make the fight for DACA recipients a âoemoral imperativeâ or else risk jeopardizing their chances in 2018.

âoeThe fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Partyâ(TM)s future electoral success,â the memo reads

Here's what the math should look like (that is, if Richman's initial study was accurate -- which many researchers doubt). If 6.4 percent of the estimated 20.3 million noncitizens in the US voted, and if just 81.8 percent of them voted for Clinton (the percentage who voted for Obama in his 2008 study), that's an added margin of a little more than 835,000 votes. In other words: Even with all of those supposedly fraudulent ballots, Clinton still would have won the popular vote by more than 2 million votes.

This post is not intended to make a specific claim on my part concerning how many non-citizens voted in 2016. It has a much narrower aim. My goal was to show that an extrapolation from my coauthored work on the 2008 election to the 2016 election did not support the arguments some seemed to be making that the entire popular vote margin for Clinton was due to illegal votes by non-citizens. In this post I do my own calculation of that extrapolation for the purpose of demonstrating that this extrapolation would not support that claim.

Also, remember this entire research is based on an opt-in online survey. In other words, as evidence of voter fraud, it's pretty much horseshit.

In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.

Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

Here I run some extrapolations based upon the estimates for other elections from my coauthored 2014 paper on non-citizen voting. You can access that paper on the journal website here and Judicial Watch has also posted a PDF. The basic assumptions on which the extrapolation is based are that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted, and that of the non-citizens who voted, 81.8 percent voted for Clinton and 17.5 percent voted for Trump. These were numbers from our study for the 2008 campaign. Obviously to the extent that critics of my study are correct the first number (percentage of non-citizens who voted) may be too high, and the second number (percentage who voted for Clinton) may be too low.

The count of the popular vote is still in flux as many states have yet to certify official final tallies. Here I used this unofficial tally linked by Real Clear Politics. As of this writing Trump is 2,235,663 votes behind Clinton in the popular vote.

If the assumptions stated above concerning non-citizen turnout are correct, could non-citizen turnout account for Clinton's popular vote margin? There is no way it could have. 6.4 percent turnout among the roughly 20.3 million non-citizen adults in the US would add only 834,318 votes to Clinton's popular vote margin. This is little more than a third of the total margin.

Is it plausible that non-citizen votes added to Clinton's margin. Yes. Is it plausible that non-citizen votes account for the entire nation-wide popular vote margin held by Clinton? Not at all.

In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections. Although such participation is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration. This study examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants. We find that some non-citizens 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. Non-citizen 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.

As Congress debates immigration reform, some political leaders and analysts have speculated that there will be "an electoral bonanza for Democrats" if the nation's estimated 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants -- three quarters of whom are Hispanics -- eventually are granted the right to vote.

While there's no way of knowing if these predictions are accurate, the data provide some insights. In 2012, the Pew Research Center's National Survey of Latinos found that among Latino immigrants who are not U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents (and therefore likely unauthorized immigrants), some 31% identify as Democrats and just 4% as Republicans. An additional 33% say they are political independents, 16% mention some other political party and 15% say they "don't know" or refuse to answer the question.

When one takes party "leaners" into account (i.e., those who don't say they identify with one of the major parties, but in a follow-up question say they feel closer to one party than the other), about half of unauthorized Hispanic immigrants either identify with (31%) or lean towards (23%) the Democratic Party, while about two-in-ten identify with (4%) or lean towards (15%) the Republican Party. About a quarter (27%) do not identify with or lean towards either party.

Comparing unauthorized immigrant Hispanics with other Hispanic subgroups suggests that as immigrants move closer towards citizenship, it is likely that a greater share of them will identify with one of the major political parties. Our survey found that most legal permanent residents (57%) and foreign-born U.S. citizens (65%) are affiliated with one of the major parties.

Our research has also found a correlation between the amount of time Hispanic immigrants (regardless of legal status) spend in the United States and the share that identifies with a political party. While nearly two-thirds (63%) of Hispanic immigrants who have been in the U.S. at least 15 years identify with one of the two major parties, that share falls to 38% among those who have been in the U.S. for fewer than 15 years.

The predictions about how unauthorized immigrants will vote stem from the fact that among all Latino immigrants who are eligible to vote (i.e. are U.S. citizens) many more identify as Democrats than as Republicans -- 54% versus 11%. And in the 2012 presidential election, according to the National Election Pool, Latino voters favored Democrat Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney by 71%-27%. While Democratic candidates have garnered a greater share of the Hispanic vote than Republican candidates in every election over the past three decades, the gap has been narrower in some elections than others. For example, in the 2004 election the gap among Hispanic votes between John Kerry and George W. Bush was only 18 percentage points (58% vs. 40%), compared with the 44 percentage point gap in the 2012 election.