Donald Trump has increasingly sought to cast doubt on the validity of the upcoming 2016 election outcome, claiming that the results will be “rigged.” He recently cited a study by political scientists Jesse Richman, Gulshan Chattha, and David Earnest that purports to use data from a large national survey — the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) — to show that some non-citizens have voted in previous elections. This study was summarized at The Monkey Cage and provoked three rebuttals (here, here, and here) as well as a response from the authors. After this exchange, we published a peer-reviewed piece arguing that this study is wrong and that there is absolutely no evidence from the data that non-citizens voted in recent presidential elections. We argue that the findings in the Richman et al. article can be entirely explained by measurement error. Specifically, survey respondents occasionally select the incorrect response to a question merely by accident.
In 2012, we re-interviewed 19,000 respondents who had originally taken the CCES survey in 2010. We asked about a respondent’s citizenship status in both 2010 and 2012. A very large fraction (99.25 percent) of respondents indicated that they were citizens in both waves of the survey. Only 85 respondents said they were non-citizens in both waves. But the remaining 56 respondents actually changed their response between 2010 and 2012 — including 20 who responded that they were citizens in 2010 but non-citizens in 2012, a highly unrealistic change.
Thus, it appears as though about 0.1-0.3 percent of respondents are citizens who incorrectly identify themselves as non-citizens in the survey. With a sample size of 19,000, even this low rate of error can result in a number of responses that appear notable when they are not. The mistake that Richman and his colleagues made was to isolate this small portion of the sample and extrapolate from it as if it were representative of some larger population.
Given the extremely low rate of voting among purported “non-citizens” described in the Richman et al. article, it is almost certainly the case that all of the non-citizen voters that they report are actually citizen voters who simply clicked the wrong box on the survey. Indeed, especially telling is this: Of the 85 respondents who said they were non-citizens in both 2010 and 2012, there was not a single voter. In other words, among the group of respondents who we can actually be confident are non-citizens, none voted. Thus the best estimate of the percentage of non-citizens who vote is zero.
Full Article: Trump thinks non-citizens are deciding elections. We debunked the research he’s citing. – The Washington Post.