[EL] Uh oh, Rick...

[Kogan, Vladimir]

I would be very careful about drawing broader conclusion about the incidence of non-citizen voting based on this study. The authors do a convincing job of showing that (1) the people who identified as being noncitizens in the survey are actually noncitizens and (2) those who say they voted actually voted.

I’m less convinced that we can generalize from this sample. The data is from the Cooperative Congressional Elections Studies survey, which is based on a non-representative opt-in panel from YouGov/Polimetrix. YouGov has a methodology for making their samples look like a random sample, and they have an excellent track record of predicting actual election outcomes. But I would be much more cautious about drawing conclusions about the representativeness of this sub-sub-population. As the authors themselves note, the educational levels among the noncitizens in their sample are much higher than the average among all noncitizens in the U.S. They try to use survey weights to get at this, but this only works as well as the demographics you’re using to construct the weights. Unless you think the noncitizens who sign-up to be in the YouGov panel are representative of noncitizens who do not, I’m not sure how much this teaches us about the aggregate rate of non-citizen voting.


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