Trump thinks non-citizens are deciding elections. We debunked the research he’s citing.
In the Washington Post, Stephen Ansolabehere, Samantha Luks and Brian Schaffner address one aspects of Donald Trump‘s claim that the 2016 election “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.
KJ