Political scientist Brian Schaffner has attempted to debunk what he describes as misleading use of his research to claim that voter fraud affected the results of the 2016 election.
University of Massachusetts Amherst political scientist Brian Schaffner says that the Trump administration is misusing his data to claim that voter fraud led to Hillary Clinton's popular vote win.Submitted photo
Most academic disputes play out in journals, lecture halls and conference rooms.
But for University of Massachusetts Political Science Professor Brian Schaffner, his opponent is the White House, the venues are CNN and the New York Times and the stakes are the integrity of American elections.
As President Donald Trump has re-launched his crusade against voter fraud, he and his communications staff have cited Schaffner's data on the American electorate to argue that millions of noncitizens voted in the 2016 election.
In response, Schaffner has embarked on a public debunking campaign of what he describes as a misleading study that abused his data to make false claims about the prevalence of voter fraud.
"I have been very vocal in speaking out about the study, especially because I feel a sense of responsibility," Schaffner said. "I helped put out the dataset that they wrongly used to create their wrong finding."
Trump has continued to insist that Hillary Clinton's 2.86 million lead in the popular vote is illegitimate due to voter fraud, both in private meetings with lawmakers and in public statements. He has pledged to launch an investigation of voter fraud, and told ABC News on Wednesday he believed there had been millions of illegal votes - a claim rejected by state voting officials and for which he has produced no direct evidence.
Trump and the White House have cited two main studies arguing that his loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton was due to fraud. One, a Pew study which found millions of inaccurate voter registrations, did not find any evidence of people using false registrations to actually vote, and its author has rejected Trump's interpretation of his work.
The other is a study that used voter data collected by Schaffner, but which he says used inaccurate methods to conclude that a significant percentage of noncitizens vote.
Schaffner is one of the lead researchers of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a survey of tens of thousands of people that delivers data used by scientists studying the American electorate.
His link to the voting fraud controversy began in 2014, when Old Dominion University political scientists Jesse Richman and David Earnest used data from Schaffner's 2010 study to conclude that 14 percent of non citizens were registered to vote. If true for the entire voting population, that could suggest millions of illegal votes in federal elections.
Richman's study caught Schaffner's attention, due to the explosive nature of the finding, which conflicted with all other studies of the prevalence of voter fraud in the United States.
So Schaffner reexamined the data - and found that Richman and his team had made a critical error.
"The data we are both using presents no evidence of noncitizen voting at all," Schaffner said.
The trouble, Schaffner said, is that Richman was relying on the 121 respondents who had identified as noncitizens in the survey, out of over 19,000 who took it in total. That was a recipe for error, because if even a small fraction of respondents accidentally clicked the wrong response on the citizenship question it could throw off Richman's dataset.
And that is exactly what Schaffner's team found when they double checked the results. They had asked the 121 people who had identified as noncitizens about their voting again in 2012, and only 85 of them still said they were aliens - an improbably large shift in citizenship over two years.
And of those 85 people, only one matched to a vote record in 2010, suggesting that the vast majority if not all of Richman's voter fraud findings were due to erroneous responses to the survey's citizenship question, Schaffner said.
As the voter fraud claims reached a fever pitch in 2016, Richman has admitted that his original study may have exaggerated the number of illegal voters, but maintains that the study is still valid and has not issued a retraction.
Schaffner finds that intransigence frustrating.
"We have a responsibility as social scientists to acknowledge when we're wrong," Schaffner said.
For his part, Richman has defended his paper's methodology while saying it does not support the White House's contention that illegal voting could have cost Trump the popular vote.
"Trump and others have been misreading our research and exaggerating our results to make claims we don't think our research supports," Richman told Wired last week. "I'm not sure why they continue to do it, but there's not much I can do about that aside from set the record straight."
Schaffner, a PHD graduate from Indiana University, worked at American University before joining the UMass faculty in 2008. He has long focused on collecting data about America's voters, and is the director of UMass Poll, the university's polling outfit.
His research's sudden national prominence has led to some backlash, he said. Amid a series of television appearances and media interviews dedicated to debunking the voter fraud story, some people have accused him of bias or criticized his research in emails.
And some vocal critics have called the UMass Amherst Political Science department, angered at Schaffner's public challenges to the White House.
"The poor undergraduate intern answered the phone and heard a very threatening and nasty person yelling about my work," Schaffner said.
