[EL] Uh oh, Rick...

Tue Oct 28 06:29:54 PDT 2014

I disagree that non-citizen voting is victimless, but that said, I think
it's obvious that it also has nothing in common with rape on college
campuses.

For a noncitizen to vote, the person has to evade the checks in place to
prevent voting by ineligible people.  This can happen through an intent to
commit fraud (i.e., knowingly providing false information on a registration
application), or through human error.  It is important to understand the
difference because the different origins of the problem require different
policy solutions.

I see no convincing evidence in the Electoral Studies article that would
rule out human error accounting for the five people in the study who report
being citizens and voting in the 2008 election and whose records were
validated by Catalyst.  Before drawing the conclusion that anywhere between
38,000 and 2.8 million non-citizens could have illegally voted in that
election (p. 152), and could have determined the outcome of particular
races, we need to know more about the validity of the survey data, whether
the election data consulted is error-free, and the methods used to ensure
accurate measurement.  While there is an explanation in an appendix of the
analysis the authors conducted comparing various attributes of the citizen
and non-citizen sub-samples to show the likelihood that the non-citizen
respondents were non-citizens, this analysis does not allow us to rule out
misreporting by the five vote-validated non-citizens.  The study doesn't
report how confidence intervals were calculated, how the Catalyst match
could be flawed, or even whether the five validated voters were among the
11 self-reported non-citizens who also reported being registered to vote
(and had their registration validated by Catalyst).  Michael Tesler's
Monkey Cage column yesterday concerning non citizens and misreporting in
subsequent CCES panels adds to the skepticism that the inference the
author's make about the level of non-citizen voting in the 2008 election is
valid.

If non-citizen voting were victimless, few would care whether 1 or 2.8
million non-citizens voted in an election.  I agree with Prof. Richman that
it is therefore important to study the issue, but also to be especially
careful about drawing conclusions about reality from survey and election
data, especially when we know that such data is not error-free.  We are not
operating in a protected space where scholarly mistakes or misstatements
can be collegially forgiven as they are corrected through further
research.  One problem we all have as political scientists who work on
voting behavior and election administration is that we mostly don't know
enough or properly account for the level of error in the data we use in
statistical analyses.

Lori Minnite

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 2:15 AM, Richman, Jesse T. <JRichman at odu.edu> wrote:

>  Rick,
>
> As you aptly framed it, one of the key empirical challenges is quantifying the level of non-citizen voting.  There are examples that you and others have previously identified so we know it happens.  The challenge is to identify how often.
>
> I wonder if perhaps the gap between estimates based on identified instances of non-citizens voting and the survey estimates my coauthors and I presented in our Electoral Studies piece is similar to the large gap between survey based estimates of the number of sex crimes committed on college campuses, and the number of such crimes that are prosecuted.  In part this gap may reflect measurement error in the survey instruments used, and in part it seems to reflect the substantial difference between true incidence on campus and limitations in the capacity and willingness to identify and prosecute such incidents.  The same pattern occurs for a variety of other crimes, with some going unreported.  Non-citizen voting is nearly always victimless (and our estimates show that only a very small number of races have plausibly been shifted by non-citizen participation), so that's probably especially likely in this case.
>
> While I believe the CCES provides useful data with which to approach this topic, I hope that the attention the Electoral Studies piece has received will motivate other major electoral surveys beyond the CCES to ask non-citizens about voting.  If both CPS and ANES with their very different methodologies could be included in the analysis we would surely have more and better data to work with.
>
> I look forward to talking about these issues more with you in the future.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Jesse Richman
>
> Associate Professor of Political Science
>
> Old Dominion University
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 4:57 PM, Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu <http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election>> wrote:
>
> >*  I linked to the the story Drudge links to earlier today on my blog. (See
> *>* the end of this message).  I have always said (and say in my book) that
> *>* non-citizen voting is a real, though relatively small, problem (unlike
> *>* impersonation fraud, which is essentially a blip).  For this reason I have
> *>* supported efforts to remove non-citizens from voting rolls, though not in
> *>* the period right before an election when errors are more likely to
> *>* disenfranchise voters.
> *>>* The new study appears to find a much higher incidence of non-citizen
> *>* voting than I've previously seen, and I look forward to hearing whether
> *>* people think the methodology in this paper is sound.  But even if it is
> *>* sound, this would not justify the hysteria and nonsense (and in some cases
> *>* outright dissembling) coming from some of the people you have listed below.
> *>>* Rick
> *>>>>>*   “Could non-citizens decide the November election?”
> *>* <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=67408 <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=67408>>
> *>>*  Posted on October 24, 2014 12:27 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=67408 <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=67408>>
> *>*  by Rick Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3 <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>>
> *>>* Jesse Richman and David Earnes
> *>* <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/24/could-non-citizens-decide-the-november-election/ <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/24/could-non-citizens-decide-the-november-election/>>t
> *>* at the Monkey Cage with some provocative findings on the extent of
> *>* non-citizen voting. I will be very interested to hear what others think of
> *>* the methodology in this forthcoming article
> *>* <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379414000973 <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379414000973>> in
> *>* Electoral Studies.
> *>*  [image: Share]
> *>* <https://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Felectionlawblog.org%2F%3Fp%3D67408&title=%E2%80%9CCould%20non-citizens%20decide%20the%20November%20election%3F%E2%80%9D&description= <https://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Felectionlawblog.org%2F%3Fp%3D67408&title=%E2%80%9CCould%20non-citizens%20decide%20the%20November%20election%3F%E2%80%9D&description=>>
> *>*   Posted in election administration <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18 <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>>, The
> *>* Voting Wars <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60 <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>>
> *>>>* On 10/24/14, 1:51 PM, Steve Hoersting wrote:
> *>>* It's getting tougher and tougher to dismiss and discredit John Fund, Hans
> *>* van Spakovsky, James O'Keefe, J. Christian Adams, Catherine Engelbrecht and
> *>* Rush Limbaugh:
> *>>*  http://drudgereport.com/ <http://drudgereport.com/>
> *>>*  --
> *>* Stephen M. Hoersting
> *>>>* _______________________________________________
> *>* Law-election mailing listLaw-election at department-lists.uci.eduhttp <http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election>://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election <http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election>
> *>>>* --
> *>* Rick Hasen
> *>* Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
> *>* UC Irvine School of Law
> *>* 401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
> *>* Irvine, CA 92697-8000949.824.3072 - office949.824.0495 - faxrhasen at law.uci.eduhttp <http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election>://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/ <http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/>http://electionlawblog.org <http://electionlawblog.org/>
> *>>
>
> --
> Stephen M. Hoersting
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