On Wednesday, the NYTimes wrote about the democratic party’s most recent attempt to get out the black vote this midterm. In North Carolina, the party has pushed an aggressive and racially charged ad campaign to remind their constituents why voting this election matters so much. While some may view this as a risky move, the NC democrats may need it. The article notes that, for democrats to have any chance this election, the black share of the electorate must increase from 19% (the share in 2010) to 21%.
Is their plan working? The below figure shows the percent early in-person black and nonblack turnout relative to all NC registrants in 2010, 2012, and 2014.
Figure 1
There has been a lot of ink spilled over a recent article in the Monkey Cage that suggested that “Non Citizens Could Decide the The November Election.” At last count, the post had generated 3305 comments, the most by far in the history of the Monkey Cage.
The blog posting was based on a forthcoming article in Electoral Studies, which had a less provocative title (“Do Non Citizens Vote in US Elections“) but does contain this highly charged claim:
These results allow us to estimate the impact of non-citizen voting on election outcomes. We find that there is reason to believe non-citizen voting changed one state’s Electoral College votes in 2008, delivering North Carolina to Obama, and that non-citizen votes have also led to Democratic victories in congressional races including a critical 2008 Senate race that delivered for Democrats a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
The conservative websites, such as the National Review and the Drudge Report, that publicized the findings, seem to have missed the final statement in the article:
For those who wish to further restrict participation by non-citizens, however, our results also provide important cautions. Simple resort to voter photo-identification rules is unlikely to be particularly effective.
My interest here is less in the possible problems with the study; John Ahlquist and Scott Gelbach and Michael Tesler, in separate Monkey Cage postings, have done a nice job summarizing these.
And to the credit of Jesse Richman, the lead author of the study, he has not shrank from the public gaze and has engaged with his critics at Rick Hasen’s Election Law blog in particular.
But I have to add that this quote, in a recent “Fact Checker” article in the Reno Gazette-Journal, is just brutal.
UPDATE: After this story posted, Richman replied via email:
“We agree with your rating of a ‘4’ because:
“A. Noncitizen voting might tip one or two extremely close races but is unlikely to tip the balance in the Senate, and certainly not in the House.
“B. Science is a process of finding, validation, replication and rebuttal. We are at the very beginning of the process. Colleagues have raised reasonable questions about the data we used–problems that we acknowledge in both the study and the Monkey Cage. It will take some time and additional research to increase confidence in our findings.”
Horse. Stable Door. Too Late.
The damage form this study may have already been done. Doug Chapin, someone who bridges political science and policy, has already written (“Is Political Science Blowing It’s Close Up?”) about the impact of this study (and the Montana experiment) on when and how election administrators may engage with scholars. I am attending a conference of election officials in just a few weeks, and I am certain I will have to defend our discipline from those who are already skeptical about working with scholars.
Any political scientist, and particularly those who work in the elections administration and election policy fields, need to be worried to see a quote like this from one of our supporters and friends:
But if political scientists aren’t careful – either in monitoring their own or their colleagues’ research and publishing decisions – the interest in political science-driven stories will wane. Or worse, it could become yet another (albeit more numerate) weapon in the ongoing rhetorical wars between the parties.
It will also make it harder for researchers and election officials to “play nice” with one another on projects of mutual interest – which for me would be the unkindest cut of all.
My professional association is working hard to convince politicians and policy makers that our scholarship can be relevant. But we as members need to be very circumspect about how we publicize our work, particularly in the context of a dynamic and competitive election campaign. This is not about a few citations or a few appearances on local news shows. This is about political power, and those in power can be quite unforgiving.
Oregon ballots are being returned in droves. As the Oregonian reported earlier today, one in five voters have already returned their ballots. The piece briefly mentions that return raters are higher in smaller counties, but doesn’t go any further. So, I quickly rank ordered the counties with respect to return rates for democrats, republicans, and all voters:
There were two structural–as opposed to political–reasons to worry about Senator Kay Hagan’s (D.) chances of winning reelection this midterm. The first? It’s a midterm election! This means lower turnout due to less educated voters foregoing the election. The quasi-technical term “less educated voters” usually means young voters and minority voters–the people who just so happen to vote for democrats.
The second? New election legislation in North Carolina has dramatically changed the voting landscape. One consequence is that the first week of early voting was cut off, which means that there are fewer days to use North Carolina’s very popular one-stop voting mode (in 2012, over 40% of voters returned their ballots before Election Day). It seemed unlikely, given this change, that early turnout would be as high as it could be, which would, in yet another way, hurt Hagan’s chances.
So: Bad tidings for Hagan, who also faces a tough challenge from her republican opponent Thom Tillis. 538’s forecast for this race has Hagan winning, but only by a hair, and the vote share is well within the margin of error.
Bad tides, maybe. But the first few days of early voting may tell a very different story. Check out figure 1, which presents the proportion of democrats, republicans, and unaffiliated voters who turned out in both 2010 and 2014. Two points stand out. First, voters in NC are turning out early at a much faster rate this year than in 2010. So much faster, in fact, that, with eight days until Election Day, the proportion of democrats to vote early this year is already the same as the proportion to vote eight days out in 2010. Again, that’s with five fewer days to vote (I made the same point in my previous post).
Now, republicans and unaffiliated voters aren’t too far behind, so clearly voters, in general, aren’t too perturbed by the change in the number of early voting days. But let’s consider what it means that (a) democrats are turning out at a fast rate this year, and (b) that their fast turnout rate is faster than the rate republicans and unaffiliated voters are turning out.
Figure 1
Thomas Leeper, in a recent blog posting, makes what strikes me as a very problematic claim to try to justify the Montana field experiment.
Leeper asserts that non-partisan elections “do not obtain the democratic benefits that their advocates hope for,” and that “judicial elections are not necessarily a democratic good.”
I defer to Prof. Leeper for the justifications of these claims; I have no reason to doubt his summary of the literature. I find his arguments intuitively and theoretically appealing.
But how can this possibly justify the Montana field experiment? Leeper is arguing that scientific research that in the process of conducting the research actively undermines a democratic election practice cannot be criticized if the process itself is of questionable democratic value.
Please note, I am not saying that political scientists should not subject election procedures to the closest possible empirical and normative scrutiny. But Leeper misses the point, made by myself in an earlier post and by Melissa Michelson on the New West Blog, that this experiment did not just study the impact of providing partisan cueing information on voter turnout in a non-partisan election, by its very scope, could have undermined the practice itself.
There are 671,031 registered voters in Montana, so this mailer was sent to 15% of the electorate. Depending on how many of the recipients had already intended to vote, using the 2010 turnout as a baseline, as much as half the total voting population received this mailer!
Choose your guide to research ethics in the social sciences. Here is one from Notre Dame, and second from Iowa State. I didn’t choose these with any particular intent in mind; they were just two of the first that came up after a Google search of “ethical guidelines for social science research.”
Others may disagree, but I fail to see how this study attempted to, at a minimum:
- Consider and anticipate effects on third parties that are not directly included in the research (judicial candidates, supporters of non-partisan elections in Montana)
- Show respect for the values and views of research subjects, even if they differ from those generally accepted by society at large (if we accept Leeper’s argument that non-partisan elections are a net bad, and so if the experiment undermined the Montana election it’s OK since those who believe this are simply wrong)
The example used in research ethics 101 is this: we cannot be absolutely sure that someone does not have HIV (today the example used would be Ebola) unless we tested all of their blood. The problem with this test: it would kill the individual. We should minimize to the degree possible the impact of our measurement on the thing we are measuring, and this research design fails this test.
Finally, I’m really amazed that this research is justified on the grounds that private entities are doing this anyway. John Patty writes:
I will point out quickly that this type of experimental work is done all the time by corporations. This is often called “market research” or “market testing.” People don’t like to think they are being treated like guinea pigs, but trust me…you are. And you always will be.
Corporations are not subject to an IRB. I we hold ourselves to a higher standard than simply what makes money for Anheuser Busch.
A provocatively titled posting at the Monkey Cage suggests that Non Citizens Voting Could Decide the 2014 Election.
I discussed the Electoral Studies article that the Monkey Cage posting is based on at Early Voting.net, and expressed concerns then that the article made a number of very heroic assumptions to be able to claim that non-citizens were voting in significant numbers, and even more heroic assumptions to assume that these votes “created the filibuster proof majority in 2008,” as the authors claim.
Now the authors have doubled down, writing on Monkey Cage that non-citizens “could decide” the 2014 election, whatever that means in the context of House, Senate, gubernatorial, state legislative, and other races.
I’m engaged with my professional association in trying to show the public relevance of political science, but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. There are heated public debates going on right now about the voter identification, and regardless of which side of this debate you are on, it’s dangerous to inject yourself into this debate based on a first look at a question like this, based on what many other scholars consider to be extremely tenuous assumptions.
Rick Hasen has posted a very nice followup on his blog that summarizes the situation far better than I can.
For those readers interested in the more detailed criticisms, I’ve provided a link to the whole thread from the Election Law listserv. (Against listserv policy, apologies to fellow list members. Suffice it to say that there are trenchant criticisms, and I’ve encouraged those posting to enter the public dialogue.)
I encourage readers to pay especially close attention to any critiques provided by Michael McDonald. McDonald is the expert on identifying the number of non-citizens among the population, an exercise he engages in every two years in order to produce his estimates of the voting age population (VAP), voting eligible population (VEP), and voter turnout.
This one is not over, I am sure of that, and I expect to see additional scrutiny and replications in the next few months. This will not be soon enough to avoid inevitable post-election charges that in-person voter impersonation is rampant.
Early voting in North Carolina began on Thursday (October 23rd), and continues until Saturday, November 1st. One of this year’s most competitive Senate elections, between Senator Kay Hagan (D) and her opponent Thom Tillis, may come down to the state’s early returns (early voting in NC being incredibly popular). On top of that, the legality of major (and controversial) new election legislation in North Carolina–legislation that, among other changes, cut the first week off of early voting–may come down to a decision by the Supreme Court. Both reasons make knowing how the early returns look this election especially important.
After only two days of early voting, there isn’t much to say about the results. I want to show two quick graphs, however, that may augur next week’s results. The first graph shows the proportion of democrats, republicans, and unaffiliated voters that have already returned their ballots.
Since at least last Monday, the Oregon Secretary of State’s website has published turnout numbers for the upcoming midterm. For whatever reason, however, they did not publish any data over the weekend, leaving me (and potentially many campaign managers) frustrated by the lack of information. Turnout is, probably, the most important issue in midterm elections, and leaving so many in the dark during such a crucial moment in the election is really unfortunate.
Thankfully, however, the office once again published their data earlier today. As in an earlier post, I’ve rank ordered the counties by overall turnout, democratic turnout, and republican turnout:
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