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A recurring refrain issuing from President Trump's Twitter account ever since he won the 2016 election by 74 electoral votes in November holds that he was robbed of a victory in the popular vote count (which Hillary Clinton won by 2,865,075 votes) due to at least 3 million illegal ballots cast by non-citizens. The documentation offered to support this assertion has ranged from vague to nonexistent. When asked to defend it in a 24 January 2017 press conference, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated that Trump's belief that there was massive voter fraud in 2016 was based on studies he's seen. Pressed to cite such a study, Spicer said, There's one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who voted were non-citizens. Albeit mistaken about both its origins (it was written by researchers at Old Dominion University using data collected by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, not Pew) and findings (it did not remotely show that 14 percent of the electorate — amounting to 18 million voters — were non-citizens), Spicer was, at least, alluding to an actual study. In fact, the same study was cited for the same purposes two days after the press conference in a Washington Times article stating that Hillary Clinton benefited to the tune of 834,381 non-citizen votes in the 2016 election: The study in question was published in the December 2014 issue of the journal Electoral Studies, titled: Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections? Its authors, Jesse T. Richman, Gulshan A. Chattha, and David C. Earnest of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, sought to contribute hard data to the ongoing, largely partisan debate over how much voter fraud actually occurs in the United States. Richman and Earnest summarized their research in a 24 October 2014 article in the Washington Post: To be clear, when Sean Spicer cited this study to support Trump's assertion that millions voted illegally in the 2016 election, he was referring to a set of extrapolations made in 2014 based on data collected by another research group in 2008 and 2010. Further, the validity of those extrapolations has been repeatedly challenged by the original pollsters (more about that later). Just as importantly, the lead author of the study advancing those extrapolations, Jesse Richman, has said that even if their conclusions were 100 percent valid — which, again, is in question — they don't confirm Trump's claim that millions voted illegally: Returning to the Washington Times piece defending Trump's assertion about illegal voters (see top of page), the article creates the impression, perhaps intentionally, that Richman conducted fresh research using new data from the 2016 election. However, in a 27 January 2017 open letter to the Times, Richman objected that both his research and his own comments about the research were misrepresented: Finally, we must address the question of whether the extrapolations Richman et al made in their 2014 study were valid in the first place. Let us turn to one of the pollsters who compiled the original Cooperative Congressional Election Study voter data in 2008 and 2010, Brian Schaffner, who wrote: Although based on precisely the same data as Richman's, Schaffner's conclusion could not be more starkly different. To simplify his argument (which we encourage all to read in full), the Richman study failed to account for measurement error — specifically, it failed to account for the frequency with which survey respondents may have incorrectly identified themselves as non-citizens: Correcting for those errors, says Schaffner, the likely number of non-citizen voters in the 2016 election turns out to be not 5 million, nor 3 million, nor even 800,000, but zero.
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