Today an item scrolled by on my Facebook feed that alleges evidence of 800,000 illegal votes in the 2016 election. The source of the article was the highly partisan Sean Hannity, quoting a Washington Times piece:
Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trump’s assertion.
Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by Mr. Richman said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November. He extrapolated that that percentage would have added 834,381 net votes for Mrs. Clinton, who received about 2.8 million more votes than Mr. Trump.
I decided chase down this study. Here was what I found with just a little bit of effort searching Google for Jesse Richman
As a primary author cited in this piece, I need to say that I think the Washington Times article is deceptive. It makes it sound like I have done a study concerning the 2016 election. I have not.
He has more explanation of his method, and a link to the original article quoted in the Times piece. As a bounus, his original study has serious methodological shortcoming.
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)… 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.
Just a reminder to use your build-in BS detector, or at least try a little Googling.