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Do Hundreds of Counties Have 1.8 Million “Ghost Voters” in the United States?

 



Voting in the 2020 U.S. election may be over, but misinformation continues to spin. Never stop checking the facts. Follow our post-election coverage here.

As the laborious process of counting millions of ballots amid the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States dragged on past Election Day 2020, US President Donald Trump and his supporters have stepped up a disinformation campaign to undermine faith in the democratic process as Trumps’ paths to victory began. closing.

Trump and his surrogates had spent the weeks leading up to the election making false claims that postal ballots, which played a key role in the COVID-19 pandemic, were vulnerable to widespread fraud. And while Trumps’ Democratic opponent Joe Biden took the lead at an electoral college and counted votes, Trump and his supporters falsely claimed the election was stolen.

As this drama unfolded, readers asked Snopes to examine social media posts and media reports reporting that several counties in the United States had more registered voters than eligible residents. to vote. One such story was published by The Washington Times and made headlines, Judicial Watch finds 1.8 million ghost voters in 29 states, warns of dirty elections.

Judicial Watch, a right-wing legal activist organization, claimed to have found in an October 2020 study that 353 US counties had 1.8 million more voters than citizens of voting age.

The study consisted of a spreadsheet comparing what it described as the most recent registration data for counties released by state election officials, and the most recent data from census offices in the United States from of the American Community Survey (ACS), from 2014 to 2018, particularly the citizens of the voting age population, or CVAP. It also included a column for active and inactive county voters, and a column for the percentage of total voters registered on CVAP.

Experts we consulted warned that figures recorded by Judicial Watch, which they said showed counties had ghost voters, or more registered voters than the resident population eligible to vote, were misleading. This underlying assumption, they said, was the result of a problematic comparison between two different types of data sets.

The American Community Survey is based on a sample. It’s not a census, statistician Philip Stark, associate dean of mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Berkeley told us in an email. Its population estimates between decennial censuses are approximate; the approximation will be worse at the county level than at the state level. Using the ACS to determine the number of eligible voters is problematic.

We will explain why.

The purpose of the ACS is to give government officials snapshots of communities to assess the funding and services needed in those communities. Because the data is collected over a five-year period, comparing it to current voter registration is equivalent to an apples-to-oranges comparison, said D. Sunshine Hillygus, professor of political science at Duke University.

Examples of why ACS data may not accurately reflect the true population eligible to vote at any given time are that ACS data would not reflect population changes that have occurred since the election. survey has been carried out, such as changes as to who enters or leaves a community. , or people who were minors at the time of the survey but have since reached the age of majority to vote.

The data also may not reflect the fact that some people are of voting age but are not eligible for other reasons, such as having a criminal record, Hillygus said.

The point is, the U.S. Community Survey is useful as a population snapshot, but it won’t give you an accurate population count on Election Day, Hillygus said.

Hillygus pointed to a Pew investigation that indicated millions of Americans have moved since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stark also pointed out that, the study appears to use an average population of 5 years (ending in 2018) but a current snapshot of voter registrations. The problem is that if the population of a given area increases, the result will be that the five-year population average and the area population in 2018 will be lower than the current area population.

In other words, if you check the voter registration numbers in fall 2020, a larger overall population in a given region could mean there were more registered voters there than. when the ACS was taken.

Another problem with the comparison is that voter registration figures kept by state election officials do not always reflect the exact number of registered voters in a given area, as the numbers are not automatically updated when someone has moved, Stark told us. In addition, federal law and various sets of state laws govern when and under what circumstances a jurisdiction can register voters as inactive.

Generally speaking, Stark told us, if a voter has not voted in at least two previous general elections, the courts can classify them as inactive voters. Stark added:

If you didn’t vote, you didn’t vote fraudulently. In some states, the consequence of being an inactive voter is simply that you don’t automatically get a mail ballot. In others you are removed from the voters list again, the consequence is that you cannot vote (without updating your status), not that there are tons of ineligible voters who can still vote.

The key column in the Judicial Watch study that gives the percentage difference of registered voters compared to the CVAP (the voting age population of ACS citizens) is misleading because it includes inactive voters, Stark said.

Ultimately, the experts we consulted said comparing CVAP numbers to voter registration numbers does not prove the existence of ghost voters in the counties. The two datasets give rise to problematic comparisons due to differences in the time period they were taken, the different purposes of each dataset, and the method by which they are collected.

We’ve reached out to Judicial Watch with questions about the study raised by experts and will update if we have any news.

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