“MILLIONS” OF NON-CITIZENS VOTED IN 2016
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY M. WARNER
JANUARY 25, 2017


FIRST, I MUST SAY THAT THE ABILITY OF THAT MANY NON-CITIZENS TO GET THROUGH THE HANDS ON VETTING BY POLL WORKERS ASTOUNDS ME. WHEN I GO TO VOTE, THEY DO CHECK MY NAME, ADDRESS, DATE OF BIRTH, AND PARTY AFFILIATION BY MY DRIVERS LICENSE EVERY TIME, AND UNLESS THEY ARE EXTREMELY INATTENTIVE THEY SHOULDN’T MISIDENTIFY VERY MANY PEOPLE. IT WOULD REALLY SURPRISE ME. IN THE CASE OF NATURALIZED AMERICANS, THEY PROBABLY DO HAVE TO SHOW A CARD, PASSPORT OR SOMETHING TO VERIFY THAT. WITH ALL THE REPUBLICAN FUROR IN THE LAST TEN YEARS OVER THE NEED FOR RELIABLE ID, AND THE NUMBER OF STATES WHICH HAVE PASSED SUCH RULES ALREADY, THAT MUCH ERROR AT THE POLLING PLACE SEEMS HIGHLY UNLIKELY AT BEST.

SECOND, THE FOLLOWING INCISIVE ARTICLES ON THE REPEATED TRUMP CLAIMS OF BEING CHEATED OUT OF THE POPULAR VOTE -- WHICH HE IS SURE HE SHOULD HAVE EARNED -- REALLY DIG INTO THE VALIDITY OF THE WHOLE ISSUE. NOT AT ALL SURPRISING IS THE FACT THAT THE CLAIM WAS FIRST REPORTED IN BREITBART AND NATIONAL REVIEW – FOUNDED BY STEVE BANNON AND WILLIAM F BUCKLEY, JR., RESPECTIVELY – WHICH ARE BOTH HIGHLY BIASED SOURCES TOWARD THE RIGHT; AND THE ACCURACY OF THE COOPERATIVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION STUDY DATA HAS ALSO BEEN CALLED INTO QUESTION.

ONE OF THE ARTICLES BELOW FOCUSES ON THEIR METHOD OF GATHERING DATA WHICH IS “OPT-IN SELF-REPORTING” ON THE INTERNET, AND HAS BEEN FOUND TO HAVE A LARGE NUMBER OF MISREPRESENTATIONS – PERHAPS ACCIDENTALLY, BUT IT’S A LARGE NUMBER OF CASES – OF THEIR ACTUAL CITIZENSHIP AND VOTING RECORDS AS REPORTED BY COOPERATIVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTION STUDY (CCES).THAT STUDY HAS BEEN PANNED PRETTY WIDELY IN THE MAINSTREAM NEWS SOURCES AS BEING, AT LEAST IN SOME WAYS, INACCURATE AND NOT A GOOD AND REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLING OF THE US ADULT POPULATION. SEE THAT ARTICLE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST.

THE CBS ARTICLE ON THE DANGERS OF CABINET MEMBERS AND OTHER ADVISORS BEING APPARENTLY UNABLE TO “SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER” DIDN’T MENTION THE POSSIBILITY OF A LEADER WITH TRUMP’S TEMPERAMENT MAKING DECISIONS, TOTALLY ON HIS OWN AND BASED ON TWO BIASED NEWS SOURCES AND INADEQUATE POLLING BY A HARVARD UNIVERSITY PROJECT CALLED CCES. CBS ALSO STATES THAT THE ORIGINAL INFORMATION TRUMP USED ON THIS DATA WAS PUBLISHED BY TWO FAR RIGHT SOURCES, “INFOWARS,” BY A WELL KNOW CONSPIRACY THEORIST NAMED ALEX JONES, AND ANOTHER RIGHT LEANING “EXPERT” NAMED GREGG PHILLIPS. SO MUCH FOR TRUTHFUL INFORMATION, AND MUCH AS I HATE TO SAY THIS, I DON’T BELIEVE THE DISCREPANCY IS DUE TO HONEST ERROR, BUT TO POLITICALLY BASED “FAKE NEWS!!”



BELIEVING VS KNOWING – FOUR ARTICLES

****https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/27/methodological-challenges-affect-study-of-non-citizens-voting/?utm_term=.49266ff7b1c9

Methodological challenges affect study of non-citizens’ voting
By Michael Tesler
October 27, 2014

Photograph -- (Sue Ogrocki/AP)

A recent Monkey Cage piece by political scientists Jesse Richman and David Earnest, which suggested that non-citizen voting could decide the 2014 Election, received considerable media attention over the weekend. In particular, columns such as Breitbart.com’s “Study: Voting by Non-Citizens Tips Balance for Democrats” and the National Review’s “Jaw-Dropping Study Claims Large Numbers of Non-Citizens Vote in U.S” cited results from the authors’ forthcoming Electoral Studies article to confirm conservatives’ worst fears about voter fraud in the United States.

A number of academics and commentators have already expressed skepticism about the paper’s assumptions and conclusions, though. In a series of tweets, New York Times columnist Nate Cohn focused his criticism on Richman et al’s use of Cooperative Congressional Election Study data to make inferences about the non-citizen voting population. That critique has some merit, too. The 2008 and 2010 CCES surveyed large opt-in Internet samples constructed by the polling firm YouGov to be nationally representative of the adult citizen population. Consequently, the assumption that non-citizens, who volunteered to take online surveys administered in English about American politics, would somehow be representative of the entire non-citizen population seems tenuous at best.

Perhaps a bigger problem with utilizing CCES data to make claims about the non-citizen voting in the United States is that some respondents might have mistakenly misreported their citizenship status on this survey (e.g. response error). For, as Richman et al. state in their Electoral Studies article, “If most or all of the ‘non-citizens’ who indicated that they voted were in fact citizens who accidentally misstated their citizenship status, then the data would have nothing to contribute concerning the frequency of non-citizen voting.” In fact, any response error in self-reported citizenship status could have substantially altered the authors’ conclusions because they were only able to validate the votes of five respondents who claimed to be non-citizen voters in the 2008 CCES.

It turns out that such response error was common for self-reported non-citizens in the 2010-2012 CCES Panel Study — a survey that re-interviewed 19,533 respondents in 2012 who had currently participated in the 2010 CCES. The first table below, for instance, shows that nearly one-fifth of CCES panelists who said that they were not American citizens in 2012 actually reported being American citizens when they were originally surveyed for the 2010 CCES. Since it’s illogical for non-citizens in 2012 to have been American citizens back in 2010, it appears that a substantial number of self-reported non-citizens inaccurately reported their (non)citizenship status in the CCES surveys.

Non-Citizens (2012)
Non-Citizen (2010) 85 (80.9%)
Immigrant-Citizen (2010) 12 (11.4%)
Born in the USA (2010) 8 (7.6%)

Even more problematic, misreported citizenship status was most common among respondents who claimed to be non-citizen voters. The second table below shows that 41 percent of self-reported non-citizen voters in the 2012 CCES reported being citizens back in 2010. The table goes on to show that 71 percent of respondents, who said that they were both 2012 non-citizens and 2010 voters, had previously reported being citizens of the United States in the 2010 CCES. With the authors’ extrapolations of the non-citizen voting population based on a small number of validated votes from self-reported non-citizens (N = 5), this high frequency of response error in non-citizenship status raises important doubts about their conclusions.

2012 Non-Citizen 2012 Non-Citizen
(2012 Self-Reported Voter) (2010 Self-Reported Voter)
Non-Citizen (2010) 10 (58.8%) 4 (28.6%)
Immigrant-Citizen (2010) 4 (23.5%) 4 (28.6%)
Born in the USA (2010) 3 (17.6%) 6 (42.9%)

To be sure, my quick analysis does not at all disprove Richman et al’s conclusion that a large enough number of non-citizens are voting in elections to tip the balance for Democrats in very close races. It does, however, suggest that the CCES is probably not an appropriate data source for testing such claims.



****http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sean-spicer-defends-trumps-unverified-voter-fraud-claims/

Sean Spicer defends Trump's unverified voter fraud claims
By EMILY SCHULTHEIS CBS NEWS
January 24, 2017, 3:07 PM

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that President Donald Trump has had a “long-standing belief” that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election, and that despite credible evidence, his view is “based on studies and evidence that people have presented to him.”

Asked about the claim that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally during 2016 -- a claim for which there is no known proof whatsoever, but which Mr. Trump repeated Monday night at a small reception with bipartisan congressional leaders -- Spicer said Mr. Trump truly does believe the claim.

“The president does believe that. He has stated that before. I think he’s stated his concerns of voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign,” Spicer said. “He continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence that people have presented to him.”

Press secretary: President Trump still believes voter fraud cost him
Play VIDEO
Press secretary: President Trump still believes voter fraud cost him

Asked about Mr. Trump’s evidence for those claims, Spicer again referred without specificity to “studies and information he has.”

When reporters followed up, asking again for evidence of such an explosive claim, Spicer mentioned a study “that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who have voted are non-citizens.”

Spicer’s reference here is incorrect: the study on non-citizen voting is from 2014, which Mr. Trump has on occasion cited specifically, and which was originally published in the Washington Post. The study used figures from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) in 2008 and 2010 to conclude that 14 percent of non-citizens in the survey said that they were registered to vote, but the “best guess” of the study’s authors was, “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.”

However, the Post article was roundly criticized -- and the study’s methodology appeared to be questionable enough that the Post affixed a note at the top the article saying another article claimed the study’s findings “were biased and that the authors’ data do not provide evidence of non-citizen voting.” The story was also published more than two years ago, and thus, it makes no claims about specific instances of non-citizen voting in 2016.

CBS News producer Laura Strickler contacted one of the authors of the 2014 study, Professor Jesse Richman, of Old Dominion Universitiy. Richman concedes that the guess that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 may be a little high, but he still stands by his work. However, he says and has written a blog post saying that non-citzen votes could not account for Mr. Trump’s popular vote loss. He estimates the number of non-citizen votes in 2016 might be as high as 800,000, which, he noted, “is still way short of what Trump would have needed to make up for the popular vote loss.”

Richman also said that in order for that to be the case, it would “require a truly massive increase in non-citizen voting and Trump lost by far too much for it to be accounted for by non-citizen participation.”

Mr. Trump has also made reference to a 2012 Pew Research study which found that roughly one in eight names on the voter rolls were either inaccurate or no longer valid -- again, a study that was published long before the 2016 election and makes no claims whatsoever about documented voter fraud.

Asked whether Mr. Trump intends to launch an investigation into this allegedly widespread voter fraud, Spicer replied, “maybe we will.”

“We’ll see where we go from here but right now the focus that the president has is on putting Americans back to work,” he said. “It was a comment he made on a long-standing belief.”

CBS News’ Laura Strickler contributed to this report.



****http://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-dickerson-on-possible-pitfalls-of-sean-spicer-backing-trumps-false-claims/

John Dickerson on pitfalls of Sean Spicer backing Trump's debunked claims
CBS NEWS
January 24, 2017, 7:35 PM

Video – CBS News with Scott Pelley

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer doubled down on President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in the presidential election, costing Mr. Trump the popular vote.

a5a6-dickerson-chat-transfer-frame-759.jpg
John Dickerson CBS NEWS

The president and White House have not produced any credible evidence to back up the claims, which are disputed by state elections officials. The only proof Mr. Trump claims to have are debunked and flawed studies.

CBS News political director and “Face The Nation” moderator John Dickerson told Scott Pelley that the administration faces risks in pushing untrue information.

“The reason it’s important to have a president believe in things that are true is that it creates a sense of belief in everything he says, but more importantly, the most important quality for a White House staff is the ability to tell a president something he doesn’t want to hear and contradict him when he believes something that is not true,” Dickerson said.

“And if they are not able to do it in this case, the question is whether they’ll be able to do it on more serious matters.”

Watch the video above for more of Dickerson’s conversation with Pelley.



****http://www.cbsnews.com/news/exploring-donald-trumps-claim-that-millions-voted-illegally/

Exploring Donald Trump's claim that "millions" voted illegally
By EMILY SCHULTHEIS CBS NEWS
November 28, 2016, 6:09 PM

Photograph -- President-elect Donald Trump walks past a crowd as he leaves the New York Times building following a meeting, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016, in New York. MARK LENNIHAN, AP

On Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump set off a political firestorm when he claimed, in a series of tweets, that he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton because “millions” of people voted illegally in the 2016 election.

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
3:30 PM - 27 Nov 2016
53,885 53,885 Retweets 163,424 163,424 likes

Mr. Trump’s argument -- which came in the wake of a three-state recount effort initiated by Green Party candidate Jill Stein -- has been debunked by fact-checkers across the internet, including Politifact (which rated his claims “Pants on Fire”), the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog and Snopes.

“Simply put, there is no evidence that “millions of people” voted illegally in the election,” the Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote.

So where is Mr. Trump getting his information?

Trump’s sources

Asked about this issue on the daily transition call, Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller cited two sources for Mr. Trump’s claims: a 2014 Washington Post article about non-citizen voting, and a 2012 Pew Research Center study that said one in eight voter registrations in the U.S. are no longer valid.

“So all of these are studies and examples of where there have been issues of both voter fraud and illegal immigrants voting,” he said. “So if this much attention and oxygen is going to be given to complete frivolous, throw away fundraising scheme[s] by someone like Jill Stein, then there should be actual substantive looks at the overall examples of voter fraud, illegal immigrants voting in recent years.”

This isn’t the first time both the 2014 Post story and the 2012 Pew study have gotten a mention this election cycle: back before Election Day, when Mr. Trump was warning his rallies of widespread voter fraud, these were the two stories he cited. Both were criticized at the time as insufficient proof.

The 2014 Washington Post study

The Washington Post study he refers to, published in an October 2014 article titled “Could non-citizens decide the November election,” was not actually conducted by the newspaper -- it was a guest post by two professors from Old Dominion University who had just written a scholarly article on the topic.

The two professors, Jesse Richman and David Earnest, used figures from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) in 2008 and 2010 to suggest that non-citizen voting is more widespread than people think. According to their research, 14 percent of non-citizens said in the survey data that they were registered to vote.

However, the Post article was roundly criticized -- and Richman’s and Earnest’s methodology appeared to be dubious enough that the Post affixed a note at the top the article saying another article claimed the study’s findings “were biased and that the authors’ data do not provide evidence of non-citizen voting.” The story was also published more than two years ago, and thus, it makes no claims about specific instances of non-citizen voting in 2016.

The 2012 Pew study

As for the second source Miller cited, the 2012 Pew study, the study found that approximately 24 million voter registrations, or roughly one in eight, are either inaccurate no longer valid. Additionally, the study said 1.8 dead people are still listed as voters, and 2.75 million people are registered in more than one state.

One of the authors of the Pew study, David Becker, tweeted Monday that Mr. Trump and his team were misrepresenting the findings of the study, though: while it did prove that the voter rolls contain names they shouldn’t, their study included no concrete findings or conclusions about voter fraud.”

“As primary author of the report the Trump camp cited today, I can confirm that report made no findings re: voter fraud,” Becker tweeted.

Three million?

There is a claim that three million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in 2016. This appears to have been originally published on InfoWars.com, the website run by radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

The three million figure seems to have originated with a Republican self-described voter fraud expert, Gregg Phillips, whose Twitter bio says he works for an organization called VoteFraud.org.

However, VoteFraud.org redirects to a website at the URL electionnightgatekeepers.com, which contains no evidence relating to non-citizen voting. Shen journalists began asking Phillips for his data, he said it was still being analyzed -- and he declined to make any information or evidence available.

“No. We will release it in open form to the American people,” he responded on Twitter to one reporter. “We won’t allow the media to spin this first. Sorry.”

Election officials’ responses

For their part, government and election officials have all denied that there is any issue with widespread non-citizen voting.

In another tweet Sunday, Mr. Trump suggested voter fraud had occurred in three states that he lost: California, New Hampshire and Virginia:

Follow
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!
7:31 PM - 27 Nov 2016
31,399 31,399 Retweets 102,400 102,400 likes

Officials in all three states disputed Mr. Trump’s claims, saying there was no evidence whatsoever of widespread voter fraud. In California, Secretary of State Alex Padilla said Mr. Trump’s accusation are “absurd.”

“It appears that Mr. Trump is troubled by the fact that a growing majority of Americans did not vote for him,” Padilla said in a statement Sunday night. “His unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in California and elsewhere are absurd. His reckless tweets are inappropriate and unbecoming of a President-elect.”

In New Hampshire, Senior Deputy Secretary of State David M. Scanlan, who runs the state’s Election Division, said their office had received a small number of complaints but nothing beyond the usual number they get in an election cycle.

“There’s no indication of anything that widespread taking place in New Hampshire,” he said, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader. “If he has evidence he should pass it along so we can act on it.”

And in Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe said there was no reported voter fraud in the state and that Mr. Trump should “put proof behind” his allegations.


White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, too, said in Monday’s press briefing that there has been “no evidence produced to substantiate” Mr. Trump’s claim.

“I think there is a difference between unfounded claims of fraud and a conscientious interpretation of the recount law that is consistent with the rules that Democrats and Republicans alike apply in a situation where there’s a narrow victory by one candidate or the other,” he said.