[EL] ELB News & Commentary 10/5/17

[David Ely]

This comparison is the flipside of a fallacy that I have come up against in section 2 cases where an expert tries to discredit the CVAP data by comparing raw numbers to new housing data. Census Bureau makes clear that ACS data, including cvap data is primarily intended to estimate the characteristics of different populations, not the size of the populations.  The raw numbers for total CVAP vary from one release to the next far more than the ethnic shares of CVAP. The size of the estimates is based on weighting of surveys based on separate population and housing estimates. The margins of error reported with ACS are only sampling error, while there is no margin of error for the weighting factors.

      
  Posted in election administration, Uncategorized  
Comparing registered voters and CVAP
   Posted on  October 5, 2017 7:09 pm by Justin Levitt   There have been a number of stories recently about litigation (there are a few pending cases), or threats of litigation, premised on the notion that fraud or mismanagement must account for discrepancies between the number of entries on registration rolls and Census estimates of citizen population.  There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about such claims: even apart from the fact that the measures cover different time periods, involve comparisons of survey estimates to individual counts, and are often inflated by pending entries slated for impending deletion, the measures fundamentally involve apples and oranges.  Census depends on usual physical presence and registration (usually) depends on domicile.  Those are often, but not always, the same.  Members of the military stationed domestically, for example, are counted by the Census where they are stationed, which may or may not be their voting residence: those still domiciled “back home” are often validly registered there even if they’re counted elsewhere by the Census. PILF recently issued another in a series of letters claiming mismanagement of 248 counties’ voter rolls based on comparisons like this; the claims have drawn extra attention recently because the organization’s President and General Counsel is also a member of Sec. Kobach’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Yesterday, Politifact bestowed a “false” rating on a PILF claim about the voter rolls in one Georgia county.  And Talking Points Memo weighed in with a little more context.     
   
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20171006/f54891d3/attachment.html>