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Jesse Richman (academic)

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Jesse Richman
EducationUniversity of Pittsburgh (BPhil)
Carnegie Mellon University (MA, PhD)
EmployerOld Dominion University

Jesse Richman is an associate professor of political science and geography at Old Dominion University. His research has focused on legislative politics, public opinion, electoral politics, and intellectual property.[1] He is known for his 2014 study with David Earnest about illegal non-citizen voting, which was widely rejected by the broader academic community[2] and was notably misused by Donald Trump and the election denial movement in the United States to justify false claims of widespread fraud.[3][4] Richman's expert testimony on noncitizen voting in Fish v. Kobach was widely criticized while his expert testimony in Arizona received mixed reviews.

Education

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Richman received a Bachelor of Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1999, a Master of Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Carnegie Mellon in 2005.[1]

He received a Fulbright grant at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary in 2019.[5]

2014 study with David Earnest

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See also: Electoral fraud in the United States

Before the 2014 study (and after) there was a virtual consensus in academia that noncitizen citizen did not exist on any functional level.[4]

In 2014, Richman published a widely discredited study in the Electoral Studies journal with his colleague David Earnest and Gulshan A. Chatta, which extrapolated from Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) survey response data to estimate how many non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2010. The study claimed that 6.4% of noncitizens had voted in 2008 and 2.2% in 2010.[6][7] Richman stood by his report,[8] though in 2017 he admitted his high-end estimates were unrealistic.[2]

Criticism

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A 2015 study of the same data by CCES coordinators Stephen Ansolabehere, Brian Schaffner and Samantha Luks, published in the same journal, found no evidence of noncitizen voting.[9][10][11] Researchers found that at most, one survey respondent was a non-citizen voter, though even that could be due to a false match to a voter record.[9][12] Brian Schaffner wrote about Richman’s study, "I can say unequivocally that this research is not only wrong, it is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place. There is no evidence that non-citizens have voted in recent U.S. elections."[10]

200 political scientists signed an open letter saying Richman's study should "not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting."[13] Richard Hasen in 2020 said, "one wonders how Richman's paper got published."[14] Snopes described the paper as "wildly discredited."[15] Wendy Weiser and Douglas Keith described the study as "thoroughly debunked."[16] Spenser Mestel commented on how unusual it was for Richman to make such broad claims and express so much certainty about his results at the time, which is not typical in studies on voting behavior that are heavily qualified and narrow.[4] In 2017, The New York Times said that the debate has moved on from Richman's study (whose claims it described as having fallen apart) to whether or not any evidence for noncitizen voting exists.[2]

Methodological critiques

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ABC News said the study's methodology was widely criticized.[17] The CCES sent out a newsletter encouraging researchers not to use their data the way that Richman and Earnest did.[18] The main issue with the study is the sample size and the unreliable database of Internet respondents.[18] When the survey was rerun by different researchers and the people who answered the citizenship question differently were removed as presumably having misclicked the survey result in the earlier survey, the researchers found 0 non-citizens who voted.[18] The Intercept argued that five clicks is way too small of a sample size, especially for an online survey, to extrapolate from.[3]

Use by others

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The study was cited, often improperly, by conservative news and conspiracy theory websites,[15] by writers at Breitbart and by Donald Trump, claiming that the study showed noncitizen voting to be a real issue and one that could be changing election outcomes all over the United States.[3][4] In 2017, Richman rebuked Trump's false claims that millions of non-citizens had voted saying "Trump and others have been misreading our research and exaggerating our results to make claims we don't think our research supports."[19] A self-described political moderate, Richman sometimes regrets publishing the study given how it has been a cornerstone of Trump's claims of voter fraud and hopes that decisions on what to do about voter fraud are made on the totality of research and not just one cherry-picked study, even if it's the one he published.[19]

Court testimony

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Fish v. Kobach (2018)

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In 2017, NBC News described Richman's claim of 18,000 noncitizen voters in Kansas as having been debunked.[20] Richman had extrapolated from "having discovered six noncitizens on a list of Kansans with temporary drivers' licenses who 'either registered to vote or attempted to register to vote."[20] Tomas Lopez of the Brennan Center criticized Richman as putting out big estimates but not checking to see if they are accurate.[20]

Kris Kobach paid Jesse Richman $40,663.35 as an expert witness in 2018 for Fish v. Kobach.[4] ProPublica summarized Judge Julie Robinson's assessment of Richman's conclusions as "'confusing, inconsistent and methodologically flawed,' and adding that they were 'credibly dismantled' by Ansolabehere. She labeled elements of Richman’s testimony 'disingenuous' and 'misleading,' and stated that she gave his research 'no weight' in her decision."[21] Richard Hasen called parts of Richman's testimony "social science at its worst".[14]

Arizona citizenship law case (2023)

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In 2023, Richman examined Arizona state voter and DMV files as an expert witness for a court case on Arizona's proof of citizenship law. Richman said that he found 1,934 registered voters out of more than 4 million whose records indicated they were non-citizens at the time of registration or afterward. He also examined nationwide data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), and found that just under one percent of non-citizens were registered to vote. Richman estimated that half a percent of non-citizens had voted in 2022.[8][22]

U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton wrote in her ruling on the case that "the Court found Dr. Richman’s testimony credible and affords his opinions considerable weight."[8] Justin Levitt, who had been skeptical of Richman's earlier research on the topic, said "while the CES data here does look to me to be more reliable than Prof. Richman's prior forays, I'd need some more information before I believed it were reliable" and posited that non-citizen turnout could be lower than Richman estimated.[23] Brian Schaffner "rejects the use of the CES to study noncitizens entirely," one of the techniques used by Richman to claim significant noncitizen voting in Arizona.[24]

Writing

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Richman has written opinion pieces for The Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post.[5][25][26][27]

Books

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Richman has co-authored two books on international trade:

References

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  1. ^ a b "Jesse Richman". Old Dominion University. August 21, 2022. Archived from the original on September 8, 2024. Retrieved September 9, 2024.
  2. ^ a b c "Illegal Voting Claims, and Why They Don't Hold Up". New York Times. January 26, 2017. Mr. Richman still maintains that some small percentage of noncitizens vote in American elections. But the debate over this study has moved on. It's no longer about whether millions of illegal votes were cast, but whether there's any evidence for noncitizen voting at all. The study's bold claims fell apart because of something called response error: the possibility that people taking a survey don't answer a question correctly — in this case, a question about being American citizens. There is always a tiny amount of response error in surveys. Respondents might not understand the question. Or they might understand it, but mark the wrong answer by mistake, if the survey is self-administered. An interviewer, if there is one, could accidentally record the wrong answer. Such errors usually aren't a problem large enough to change the results of a survey.
  3. ^ a b c Mackey, Robert (January 26, 2017). "Just 5 Clicks on an Internet Survey Inspired Trump's Claim Millions Voted Illegally". The Intercept. Retrieved September 8, 2024.
  4. ^ a b c d e Mestel, Spenser (November 1, 2020). "How claims of voter fraud were supercharged by bad science". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved September 16, 2024.
  5. ^ a b Richman, Jesse (January 13, 2020). "Opinion: Has Hungary's opposition learned to coordinate against Fidesz, the right-wing governing party?". Washington Post (Monkey Cage blog). ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved September 11, 2024.
  6. ^ Richman, Jesse (October 24, 2014). "Blog: Could non-citizens decide the November election?". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 18, 2015.
  7. ^ Richman, Jesse T.; Chattha, Gulshan A.; Earnest, David C. (December 1, 2014). "Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?". Electoral Studies. 36: 149–157. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2014.09.001.
  8. ^ a b c Kessler, Glenn (March 6, 2024). "Opinion: The truth about noncitizen voting in federal elections". Washington Post. Archived from the original on April 13, 2024. Retrieved April 21, 2024. There is scattered evidence of noncitizens voting in federal elections — sometime by mistake (such as erroneously thinking they were eligible while getting a driver's license) but also with nefarious intent ... Given the paucity of evidence of noncitizen voting, many election researchers have long said that there was little to support the idea that noncitizen voting had ever affected the outcome of a major election. But that does not necessarily prove that the phenomenon does not happen.
  9. ^ a b Ansolabehere, Stephen; Luks, Samantha; Schaffner, Brian F. (December 2015). "The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys". Electoral Studies. 40: 409–10. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2015.07.002.
  10. ^ a b Schaffner, Brian. "Trump's Claims About Illegal Votes Are Nonsense. I Debunked the Study He Cites as 'Evidence.'". Politico Magazine. Retrieved January 27, 2017. I can say unequivocally that this research is not only wrong, it is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place. There is no evidence that non-citizens have voted in recent U.S. elections.
  11. ^ Mestel, Spenser (November 1, 2020). "How claims of voter fraud were supercharged by bad science". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved September 28, 2024.
  12. ^ Tesler, Michael (October 27, 2014). "Methodological challenges affect study of non-citizens' voting". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved September 8, 2024. A number of academics and commentators have already expressed skepticism about the paper's assumptions and conclusions, though...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...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...Even more problematic, misreported citizenship status was most common among respondents who claimed to be non-citizen voters...CCES is probably not an appropriate data source for testing such claims.
  13. ^ Huseman, Jessica (June 19, 2018). "How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed". ProPublica. Retrieved September 8, 2024. Academics pilloried Richman's conclusions. Two hundred political scientists signed an open letter criticizing the study, saying it should 'not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting.' Harvard's Stephen Ansolabehere, who administered the CCES, published his own peer-reviewed paper lambasting Richman's work. Indeed, by the time Trump read Richman's article onstage in 2016, The Washington Post had already appended a note to the op-ed linking to three rebuttals and a peer-reviewed study debunking the research.
  14. ^ a b Hasen, Richard L. (2020). "Chapter 1". Election meltdown: dirty tricks, distrust, and the threat to American democracy. Yale University Press. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, [2020]. ISBN 978-0-300-24819-7.
  15. ^ a b Kasprak, Alex (May 31, 2024). "'New Study' Found 10 to 27% of Noncitizens in US Are Registered to Vote?". Snopes. Retrieved September 8, 2024.
  16. ^ Weiser, Wendy; Keith, Douglas (February 13, 2017). "The Actually True and Provable Facts About Non-Citizen Voting". TIME. Retrieved September 8, 2024.
  17. ^ "Fact-Checking Trump's Claims About 'Serious Voter Fraud'". ABC News. November 28, 2016. Retrieved September 8, 2024.
  18. ^ a b c Graves, Allison. "Trump wrong on percentage of noncitizen voters". @politifact. Retrieved September 9, 2024.
  19. ^ a b Lapowsky, Issie. "Author of Trump's Favorite Voter Fraud Study Says Everyone's Wrong". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved September 8, 2024.
  20. ^ a b c Timm, Jane C.; Edelman, Adam (July 19, 2017). "Illegal voting? Not much in Kobach's home state". NBC News. Retrieved September 11, 2024.
  21. ^ Huseman, Jessica (June 19, 2018). "How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed". ProPublica. Retrieved September 9, 2024.
  22. ^ Joffe-Block, Jude (October 12, 2024). "6 facts about false noncitizen voting claims and the election". NPR. Retrieved October 16, 2024.
  23. ^ Kessler, Glenn (March 6, 2024). "Opinion: The truth about noncitizen voting in federal elections". Washington Post. Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who was skeptical of Richman's earlier research, said in an email that "while the CES data here does look to me to be more reliable than Prof. Richman's prior forays, I'd need some more information before I believed it were reliable." He also said he would be curious to know how many of the noncitizens who registered in Arizona cast ballots, as turnout could be lower than average.
  24. ^ Kasprak, Alex (May 26, 2024). "'10 to 27%' of Noncitizens in US Are Illegally Registered to Vote?". Snopes. Retrieved September 13, 2024. '[The CES] is not designed to be a sample of noncitizen adults and therefore it is not fit for the purpose of studying that subset of respondents...'There are much better ways to analyze whether noncitizens register to vote,' Schaffner told Snopes. These methods, some of which Richman used in his recent expert reports, involve looking voter rolls and other state records to identify any individuals who appear to be noncitizens. Studies like these, including the Richman expert reports, 'overwhelmingly resulted in finding very few noncitizens registered to vote,' Schaffner told Snopes.
  25. ^ Richman, Jesse (December 7, 2021). "Opinion: By insisting on the 'Hastert Rule,' the House Freedom Caucus is endangering the GOP". Washington Post (Monkey Cage blog). ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved September 11, 2024.
  26. ^ Richman, Jesse (September 15, 2016). "Opinion: Trump is right. Let's get moderators out of the debates". Washington Post (Monkey Cage Blog).
  27. ^ Richman, Jesse (December 7, 2021). "Opinion: How to improve our presidential debates in one easy step: Make the clock a moderator". Washington Post (Monkey Cage Blog). ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved September 11, 2024.
  28. ^ Richman, Raymond L.; Richman, Howard B.; Richman, Jesse T. (2008). Trading Away Our Future: How to Fix Our Government-Driven Trade Deficits and Faulty Tax System Before it's Too Late. Pittsburgh, Penn: Ideal Taxes Association. ISBN 978-0-929446-05-9. OCLC 229449993.
  29. ^ Richman, Jesse T.; Richman, Howard B.; Richman, Raymond Leonard (2014). Balanced Trade: Ending the Unbearable Costs of America's Trade Deficits. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-0-7391-8880-4.
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