Illegal Votes by Non-Citizens to Decide
Midterms?
Enough cast ballots to change
outcome of close races
(Washington Post) – Could control of the Senate in 2014 be
decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of
voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts
to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from
exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat
to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than
data.
In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral
Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on
the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S.
elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do
that their participation can change the outcome of close races.
Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional
Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400
in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with
339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also
attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether
they actually voted.
How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More
than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated
that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens
voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample
with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2
percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.
Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won
more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we
find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for
Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have
given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in
order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in
the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a
victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota
non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that
non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina.
Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North
Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by
conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly
three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide
photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted.
An alternative approach to reducing non-citizen turnout
might emphasize public information. Unlike other populations, including
naturalized citizens, education is not associated with higher participation
among non-citizens. In 2008, non-citizens with less than a college degree were
significantly more likely to cast a validated vote, and no non-citizens with a
college degree or higher cast a validated vote. This hints at a link between
non-citizen voting and lack of awareness about legal barriers.
There are obvious limitations to our research, which one
should take account of when interpreting the results. Although the CCES sample
is large, the non-citizen portion of the sample is modest, with the attendant
uncertainty associated with sampling error. We analyze only 828 self-reported
non-citizens. Self-reports of citizen status might also be a source of error,
although the appendix of our paper shows that the racial, geographic, and
attitudinal characteristics of non-citizens (and non-citizen voters) are
consistent with their self-reported status.
Another possible limitation is the matching process
conducted by Catalyst to verify registration and turnout drops many non-citizen
respondents who cannot be matched. Our adjusted estimate assumes the
implication of a “registered” or “voted” response among those who Catalyst
could not match is the same as for those whom it could. If one questions this
assumption, one might focus only on those non-citizens with a reported and validated
vote. This is the second line of the table.
Finally, extrapolation to specific state-level or
district-level election outcomes is fraught with substantial uncertainty. It is
obviously possible that non-citizens in California are more likely to vote than
non-citizens in North Carolina, or vice versa. Thus, we are much more confident
that non-citizen votes mattered for the Minnesota Senate race (a turnout of
little more than one-tenth of our adjusted estimate is all that would be
required) than that non-citizen votes changed the outcome in North Carolina.
Our research cannot answer whether the United States should
move to legalize some electoral participation by non-citizens as many
other countries do, and as some U.S. states did for more than 100 years,
or find policies that more effectively restrict it. But this research
should move that debate a step closer to a common set of facts.
Source: http://www.teaparty.org/illegal-votes-non-citizens-decide-midterms-63699/ October 24, 2014
4:59 pm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/24/could-non-citizens-decide-the-november-election/
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