[EL] Uh oh, Rick...

Sat Oct 25 07:26:47 PDT 2014

I have not focused on this study, but wouldn't one reason to include both
categories 2 and 3 be to develop an upper-bound, with the understanding
that the actual number of non-citizen voters is almost certainly lower?

Just a thought.

On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 9:46 PM, Michael McDonald <
dr.michael.p.mcdonald at gmail.com> wrote:

> Some more thoughts:
>
>
>
> The authors really want to have it both ways in expanding the number of
> noncitizen voters/registrants. There are three types of matches they use in
> their definition:
>
>
>
> 1. noncitizen respondents who say they are registered and have a voter
> file match
>
> 2. noncitizen respondents who say they are not registered and have a
> voter file match
>
> 3. noncitizen respondents who say they are registered but do not have a
> voter file match
>
>
>
> #2 and #3 are at odds with one another. In #2, the authors assume the
> respondents are not truthful (for whatever reason) and the voter file is
> accurate. In #3, the authors assume the respondents are truthful but the
> matching procedure is flawed. You really can’t have it both ways. Either
> you trust the respondents or the matching procedure. If you think there are
> errors in self-reports and/or the matching procedure, then it is important
> to quantify the bias and magnitude of the errors.
>
>
>
> It also strikes me that both the 2008 and 2010 surveys have registered
> voters as the sample frame. In 2008, 11 noncitizens who said they were
> registered were matched to the voter file (category #1). In 2010, even
> though the sample size increased by 22,800 respondents, there were zero
> respondents in category #1. Why did the number do down to zero? Did the
> matching algorithm improve so that there were fewer false positives of
> noncitizens matched to the voter file? Also note the combined #2 and #3
> declined from 67 (19.8% of self-reported noncitizens) in 2008 to 76 (15.6%)
> in 2010. To the first, we might add the 11 in category #1 since they are in
> the authors’ universe. It seems like the change would be outside the
> sampling error, and might be due to improved matching algorithms finding
> fewer false positives.
>
>
>
> One might say that election administration improved between 2008 and 2010
> to knock more noncitizens off the voter rolls, which explains why there
> were fewer noncitizen registrants in 2010 compared to 2008. There is not a
> lot of evidence of that. Story after story of allegations of massive
> noncitizen voting end in a whimper when errors are found in the matching
> algorithms that uncovered the alleged noncitizen voting. It stands to
> reason if election officials have trouble with matching their voter files
> to identify noncitizens, Catalist might have similar problems when
> matching people who fit the profile of noncitizens (e.g., Latino names that
> are matched between the CCES and the voter file using fuzzy logic).
>
>
>
> I want to correct something I wrote previously, there are 6 issue areas,
> not 8, analyzed in Appendix Table a3 (actually five since the authors drop
> one of the areas without comment). Since Table 3 reports responses for all
> noncitizens, and no noncitizen voters were in three of the issue areas, I
> can fill in the missing issue areas in Table a4
>
>
>
> Fine Businesses
>
> Noncitizen non-voters 35.3%
>
> Noncitizen voters 0%
>
> Increase guest workers
>
> Noncitizen non-voters 47.1%
>
> Noncitizen voters 0%
>
>
>
> If one were to run a Chi-squared test to determine if noncitizen voters
> and nonvoters are different on the issues, then these areas should be
> included in the test. They are not.
>
>
>
> ============
>
> Dr. Michael P. McDonald
>
> Associate Professor
>
> University of Florida
>
> Department of Political Science
>
> 234 Anderson Hall
>
> P.O. Box 117325
>
> Gainesville, FL 32611
>
>
>
> phone:   352-273-2371 (office)
>
> e-mail:  dr.michael.p.mcdonald at gmail.com
>
> web:     www.ElectProject.org <http://www.electproject.org/>
>
> twitter: @ElectProject
>
>
>
> *From:* law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:
> law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] *On Behalf Of *Michael
> McDonald
> *Sent:* Friday, October 24, 2014 8:05 PM
> *To:* 'law-election at UCI.edu'
> *Subject:* Re: [EL] Uh oh, Rick...
>
>
>
> I’d like to replicate the analyses to have a better criticism, but at
> first blush I am not as confident that the authors do a convincing job of
> showing that the people identifying in the survey as non-citizens are
> actually non-citizens who voted.
>
>
>
> Those who favor voter id should welcome my critique, because on p.152 the
> authors claim that photo id requirements are ineffective to stop
> non-citizen voting.
>
>
>
> The authors’ evidence rests on two surveys, the 2008 and 2010 CCES
> surveys. The sample sizes of these surveys are 32,800 and 55,400. In 2008,
> 11 respondents identified as non-citizens who said they registered to vote
> and were matched to a voter list as being registered. In 2010 there were
> zero respondents in this category (Table 1, p.152).  There is no match to
> verify if these individuals are really non-citizens or had fat thumbs when
> they pressed buttons on their computer, or even understood the questions
> (the CCES is an internet survey).  To get higher numbers, the authors
> either use self-reports of non-citizens who self-reported being registered
> and were not matched to the voter files or reported not being registered
> and were matched with the voter files. I have many reservations about
> matching procedures and (from a legal perspective) would want independent
> confirmation from any of these three matching types that these individuals
> were in fact non-citizens who were registered to vote, especially since we
> are talking about small numbers of matches that could be a consequence of
> statistical flukes or other problems with the matching process.
>
>
>
> The authors do not report if any of the 11 noncitizens who were validated
> as registered in fact voted (again granting that the matching algorithm
> didn’t produce a false positive and that the respondents didn’t misreport
> their citizenship status). They instead use their larger definition to find
> 48 non-citizens voted and 291 did not. As a percentage of the sample, even
> these numbers are exceedingly small and survey researchers generally would
> have less confidence in such small numbers. This is where next the heavy
> use of weighting that Vladimir references comes in.
>
>
>
> Why I want to replicate their findings comes from their Appendix analyses,
> where the authors attempt to convince the reader that the non-citizen
> voters are really non-citizen voters. There’s a sleight of hand at work
> here that strikes me as cherry picking of data. In Table A3 (p.156), the
> authors examine 8 issue areas to convince us that the non-citizens are
> different than citizens. In Table A4 (p.156) the authors attempt to show
> through a similar analysis that noncitizen voters are the same as
> noncitizen non-voters. Here, they present only 3 issue areas because there
> were zero non-citizen voters who answered affirmatively to 5 issues they
> choose not to present. They conclude on the 3 issues the non-citizen
> non-voters are the same as non-citizen voters, but that is obviously not
> true for the 5 other issue areas that they choose not to report. For this
> glaring cherry picking of evidence, I’m even more highly skeptical and want
> to do a full blown replication to see where else there may be issues with
> their methods.
>
>
>
> ============
>
> Dr. Michael P. McDonald
>
> Associate Professor
>
> University of Florida
>
> Department of Political Science
>
> 234 Anderson Hall
>
> P.O. Box 117325
>
> Gainesville, FL 32611
>
>
>
> phone:   352-273-2371 (office)
>
> e-mail:  dr.michael.p.mcdonald at gmail.com
>
> web:     www.ElectProject.org <http://www.electproject.org/>
>
> twitter: @ElectProject
>
>
>
> *From:* law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [
> mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
> <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu>] *On Behalf Of *Kogan,
> Vladimir
> *Sent:* Friday, October 24, 2014 7:11 PM
> *To:* Rick Hasen; Steve Hoersting
> *Cc:* law-election at UCI.edu
> *Subject:* Re: [EL] Uh oh, Rick...
>
>
>
> 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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-- 

Jonathan H. Adler
Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law
Director, Center for Business Law & Regulation
Case Western Reserve University School of Law
11075 East Boulevard
Cleveland, OH 44106
ph) 216-368-2535
fax) 216-368-2086
cell) 202-255-3012
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SSRN: http://ssrn.com/author=183995

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/author/adlerj/
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