@cicerone imposter,
Hold up there Skippy let's look at the whole article.
Noncitizens
The second leg of Trump’s allegation of widespread voter fraud rests on “illegal immigrants voting,” another practice that experts told us is fairly rare.
In Wisconsin, Trump cited a 2014 Washington Post article titled “Could non-citizens decide the November election?” It was a piece penned by Old Dominion University professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest about research the two later published in the journal Electoral Studies. It turns out to be a disputed and very controversial study.
Trump. Oct. 17: Then there’s the issue of illegal immigrants voting. The following comes from a 2014 report from the Washington Post. This article was entitled, “Could non-citizens decide the November election?” Here’s some excerpts. “More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote.” Oh, isn’t that wonderful.
“Because non-citizens tend to favor Democrats,” — to put it mildly — “Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 sample …” You don’t read about this, right? They don’t tell you about this. “…we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories is various close elections.” OK? All right? “Non-citizen votes could have given Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform … and other Obama administration priorities.” Now, it continues, “It is possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina.”
Trump accurately quotes from the blog post. But the authors’ results are contested by a number of academics, including those who administer and manage the data on which it is based.
The study relied on data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which is administered by YouGov/Polimetrix and managed by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Richman and Earnest estimated the number of noncitizens who voted nationwide based on those in the survey who self-identified as noncitizens who 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,” Richman and Earnest wrote in the Post.
In a blistering rebuke of that study, the managers of the database on which the article by Richman and Earnest was based wrote in Electoral Studies that “measurement errors” in the survey led to a “biased estimate of the rate at which non-citizens voted in recent elections. The results, we show, are completely accounted for by very low frequency measurement error; further, the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.”
“Their finding is entirely due to measurement error,” one of the authors, Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard and the principal investigator of CCES, wrote to us in an email. “Measurement errors happen. People accidentally check the wrong box in surveys. The rate of such errors in the CCES is very small, but such errors do happen. And when they do happen on a question such as citizenship, researchers can easily draw the wrong inference about voting behaviors. Richman and Earnest extrapolate from a handful of wrongfully classified cases (of non-citizens).”
How do the database managers know? Ansolabehere explained, “We asked people in successive years their citizenship. That minimizes the error. Upon doing so we find NO INSTANCES of voting among people stating consistently that they are non-citizens."
(Well of course when asked in person they said they were citizens...If you were illegal, wouldn't you?)
“The CCES conducts a panel (repeated interviews of people asking the same questions) and vote validation,” Ansolabehere said. “We found that NONE of the 85 individuals in the 2010-2012 panel survey who indicated that they were non-citizens in 2010 and again in 2012 in fact voted.
(LOL...SAME AS ABOVE)
“The Richman and Earnest study is an incorrect use of the survey that we manage, and a false claim of evidence of non-citizen voting. It’s a dangerous, stray false-fact.”
We reached out to Richman, who told us that he and Earnest “stand by our study, but we encourage people to read the critiques too.”
Richman said Ansolabehere’s figures were off, and that there was “one individual in 2012 who identified as a non-citizen in both 2010 and 2012 and also cast a validated vote in 2012.” And, he said, “There were also ten individuals who twice stated that they were non-citizens and also stated that they voted in 2012. There were also in 2014 two out of about 26 individuals who three times confirmed that they were non-citizens who also said they voted.”
Nonetheless, Richman credited Ansolabehere and his colleagues for their “valuable contributions” to the issue, which he said “highlighted the fact that response errors could have biased our estimates upwards.” Richman said he remains “unconvinced” that Ansolabehere’s evidence shows there was no voting by noncitizens, which he said “simply [does] not fit with the data.”
“Concerning the broader fight Trump has raised, I think our results are getting taken out of context in important ways by people on the right who want to make an unsupported claim concerning massive vote fraud,” Richman told us via email. “We found low levels of non-citizen participation in elections. These levels are sufficient to change the outcomes in extremely close elections. But one should keep in mind that such elections can be swayed by any number of factors that arguably bias election results toward, or against, particular parties and candidates. Put another way, our results suggest that almost all elections in the US are not determined by non-citizen participation, with occasional and very rare potential exceptions.
“Both sides of the debate on non-citizen voting have exaggerated our findings concerning non-citizen representation,” Richman added. “There are many on the left side of that debate who have relentlessly sought to discredit our results and want to push the level of estimated participation to zero. On the right there has been a tendency to misread our results as proof of massive voter fraud, which we don’t think they are.”
Researchers who have studied the issue have found relatively few cases of noncitizens voting. That’s not to say it never happens. It has. A 2015 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation documented less than a dozen individual cases of noncitizens convicted of registering or actually voting since 2000. And in Texas, a city councilwoman was sentenced in 2007 to five years in prison for registering noncitizens to vote.
But such cases are rare, experts told us. Sarah Pierce, an associate policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, said there’s very little evidence of it, in part because the disincentives are enormous. It is an illegal offense for an unauthorized immigrant to vote — a deportable offense that makes a person permanently inadmissible for return to the U.S., she said.
GUESS THAT BLOWS THE ZERO FIGURE ALL TO HELL, HUH?
