About as many people say they’ve been abducted by space aliens as say they’ve committed voter fraud
One of the findings of a new working paper by John Ahlquist, Kenneth R. Mayer
and Simon Jackman is that “the lower bound on the population reporting voter impersonation is nearly identical with the proportion of the population reporting abduction by extraterrestrials.” Roughly 2.5 percent of the population effectively admit to one or the other. The rationale for this comparison tells us a lot about how social scientists deal with complex and touchy political issues.
People disagree publicly about the extent of voter fraud in U.S. elections. Advocates of strict identification laws, like Hans Von Spakovsky, suggest that voting identification fraud, in which people pretend to be someone else so that they can use that person’s vote, is very common. Their opponents say that there’s no evidence that voting fraud is widespread. As Ahlquist, Mayer and Jackman describe it, the social science supports the skeptics:
Virtually all the major scholarship on voter impersonation fraud - based largely on specifi c allegations and criminal investigations - has concluded that it is vanishingly rare, and certainly nowhere near the numbers necessary to have an e ffect on any election … To give one idea of the scale: a review of allegations in the 2008 and 2010 elections in Texas found only four complaints of voter impersonation, out of more than 13 million votes cast, and it is not clear whether any of the complaints actually led to a prosecution (Minnite, 2013:101). By contrast, the 2000 presidential election almost certainly was altered by poor ballot design in Palm Beach County, which resulted in at least 2,000 voters who intended to vote for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman casting their ballots for Pat Buchanan by mistake (Wand et al., 2001).
However, advocates retort that the reason why there is so little evidence of voter fraud is because it’s so easy to get away with.
What Ahlquist, Mayer and Jackman do is to look for evidence on rates of voter fraud from a very different source - survey data. The problem they face is that very few people indeed are going to admit directly to having committed election fraud. Hence, they use an ingenious trick to make it easy for people to reveal (in the aggregate) whether they’ve committed voter fraud without ‘fessing up to it as individuals. First, they randomly divide the people whom they are surveying into a control group and a treatment group. They ask each group to look at a list, and say how many of the actions on that list they have carried out (without revealing which specific actions they have done). The control group gets a list of purely innocuous actions. The treatment group gets the same list, but with one addition - a question asking them whether they have ever committed voting fraud.
By comparing the average number of actions that people in the treatment group have carried out, with the average number of actions that people in the control group have carried out, Ahlquist, Mayer and Jackman can figure out whether voting fraud is a serious problem. If voting fraud is a real problem, the average number of actions ought to be significantly higher for the treatment group than the control group. This “list experiment” approach has been applied to voting fraud in other countries, as well as to other sensitive topics that people might have difficulty talking directly about, such as racial attitudes.
Ahlquist, Mayer and Jackman’s findings are unequivocal - “the notion that voter impersonation is a widespread behavior is totally contradicted by these data.” However, a few respondents in the treatment group report that they have committed all the actions listed, including voter fraud. Should this be interpreted as evidence that they have indeed cheated at the ballot box? Or are they simply answering the question carelessly?
There’s some internal evidence to suggest that they are just being careless. But to be sure, Ahlquist, Mayer and Jackman carry out a second set of experiments, which is where the extraterrestrial abductions come in. It is probable that Americans are not being kidnapped en masse by space aliens eager to conduct experiments on their sensitive bits. So, Ahlquist, Mayer and Jackman do a second list experiment in which members of the control group, instead of being asked about voter fraud, are asked whether they have been abducted by aliens. If people answer yes to all questions with roughly the same proportions in both the space alien abduction experiment and the voter fraud experiment, then this suggests either that people are rushing through the surveys carelessly, or that alien abduction is a much bigger problem than any of us knew. And this is indeed what the authors find:
The implication here is that if one accepts that 2.5% is a valid lower bound for the prevalence of voter impersonation in the 2012 election then one must also accept that about 2.5% of the adult U.S. population - about 6 million people - believe that they were abducted by extra-terrestrials in the last year. If this were true then voter impersonation would be the least of our worries.
Washington Post