As many people say they’ve been abducted by space aliens as say they’ve committed voter fraud
About as many people say they’ve been abducted by space aliens as say they’ve committed voter fraud
By Henry Farrell November 14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/14/about-as-many-people-say-theyve-been-abducted-by-space-aliens-as-say-theyve-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 specific allegations and criminal investigations – has concluded that it is vanishingly rare, and certainly nowhere near the numbers necessary to have an effect on any election … To give one idea of the scale ...........
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