[EL] Uh oh, Rick...

[Richman, Jesse T.]

Thank you Paul for your comments.  Posting a provocatively titled piece to the Monkey Cage just before the election certainly got a lot of attention, and one of the consequences of that attention is surely going to be an extraordinary level of scrutiny. It's a remarkable trial by fire for Gulshan.  This paper started out as her paper for my undergraduate Quantitative Methods course in early 2013.  She is now the author of an internet-famous paper.

One of the things I'm sure will happen as this goes forward is that a wide range of more complex and sophisticated models will be brought to bear in order to attempt to hone the measurements.  I welcome the efforts of such honest critics.  As you so kindly noted in your first mention of the paper on your blog, this is the first effort to use validated voting to assess the frequency of non-citizen electoral participation.  I expect it won't be the last, and I would be amazed if our 'adjusted estimate' ends up being exactly right as the field works to refine the measures and data.  That's one of the ways knowledge advances, and I welcome it.

Unfortunately, our timing for the Monkey Cage piece was so close to the election that a lot of the commentary (but not all) so far seems to be about defending partisan positions rather than wrestling with the data in pursuit of truth.  The paper has critiques of the positions of both parties.  Cursory reads have led to a lot of misinterpretation of what we truly sought to make a balanced article in Electoral Studies.

Concerning sampling.  The standard ANES sample is clearly too small to be useful, I agree.  But there do seem to be moves afoot to add an address based sampling web survey with a somewhat larger N.  And Simon Jackman mentioned when he spoke at POLMETH in July that they tried to validate votes for several thousand additional people who were in the sampling frame but didn't respond to ANES.  Such efforts might get toward a big enough N.  And even though the CPS does not validate votes, asking non-citizens whether they voted could help address some of the concerns people are raising, about the CCES methodology since the survey design is different on many dimensions.

Best Regards,

Jesse

_______________
Jesse Richman
Associate Professor of Political Science
Old Dominion University

________________________________
From: Paul Gronke [paul.gronke at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2014 8:31 AM
To: Richman, Jesse T.
Cc: Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Uh oh, Rick...

The ANES sample, 2000-3000, is far too small to be able to make any sort of inferences about what everyone agrees is a very small proportion of the population.  It would be good to have the information on the CPS but without the validation step, once again there is little that could be done.

I admire you for responding to the list, Jesse, but I think the title of your Electoral Studies article was overly provocative, and to follow up with the Monkey Cage posting fanned the flames.

You've put a bullseye on your research. Perhaps that was your intention, it has certainly brought attention. We will see what the inevitable replications and retests show.

---
Paul Gronke     Ph: 503-517-7393
Reed College and Early Voting
 Information Center

http://earlyvoting.net

On Oct 28, 2014, at 2:15 AM, Richman, Jesse T. <JRichman at odu.edu<mailto: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>
>
>  Posted on October 24, 2014 12:27 pm <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=67408>
>  by Rick Hasen <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/>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> 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=>
>   Posted in election administration <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>, The
> Voting Wars <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/
>
>  --
> 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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