Also in today’s Jolt, a key update to Friday’s story about a study suggesting that large numbers of non-citizens vote in U.S. elections:

Maybe Not Quite So Many Non-Citizen Votes After All?
The Washington Post’s Monkey Blog returns to the topic of non-citizen voting, and collects the evidence suggesting that the shocking report from Friday may be inaccurate. Apparently it is surprisingly easy for some people to forget whether they’re U.S. citizens or not.
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.
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.
How does one forget something like that?

Is it that the respondents aren’t taking the survey seriously? Do they check one box when they meant to check another?

And even if the error rate among respondents is considerable, it doesn’t explain all of the respondents who said they were non-citizens who voted in either 2008 or 2010. (Also remember that this only counts people who admitted to the pollster that they were non-citizens and voted illegally; it’s quite possible some non-citizens did so and didn’t want to admit they did.)

The survey said it had 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. Assume that half of the respondents are confused about their citizenship status, joking, or marking the wrong response, and this would halve the numbers in their conclusions: about 7 percent of non-citizens registered to vote, 3.2 percent of non-citizens voting in 2008 and and 1.1 percent of non-citizens voting in 2010.

That’s still a lot. The commonly cited figure is that there are 11 to 12 million illegal immigrants in this country, and 13.1 million legal permanent residents living in the U.S. (green-card holders).

If 3.2 percent of those 24 million non-citizens are voting in a presidential year, that amounts to 768,000 votes that are illegal and should not be counted.

If 1.1 percent of those 24 million non-citizens are voting in a midterm election year, that amounts to 264,000 votes that are illegal and should not be counted.