CO-Project New America/Keating Research (D): Obama up 4

[Alcon]

Are we talking about illegal immigrants voting?  How often do you think that happens, percentage-wise?  Just curious.

[Alcon]

What was the methodology for this study?  I can't find the white paper any place online.  This is something that is extensively prone to false positives, and I doubt Colorado Elections makes SSNs publically available...so, yeah, why are we confident about lacking false positives?

As for the second article, you really think that there's no reason those counties would be transient?  I understand their incomes average out fairly normally.  But, dude...Adams, Denver, Gilpin, Gunnison, Lake, Pitkin, San Miguel, Summit...you're not seeing two obvious categories that might be associated with voter transience but not necessarily income?  I'm not from Colorado, and it seems pretty intuitive to me...more intuitive than "ACORN!"

[Alcon]

In addition to Sbane's explanation, which is a lot more compelling than "Maybe a massive number of illegal immigrants are registered to vote!", people lie about being registered to vote pretty often.  About 30% of Americans in a given election year are not registered to vote; only about 20% self-report that they aren't.  Even ignoring that some Americans probably incorrectly assume their registration has elapsed or gone inactive, that suggests that about 1-in-3 non-registered voters lie about it.  That social desirability effect may be lesser among non-citizens, since they have a clear excuse, or it may be greater.  No idea!  Point is, it's really not that difficult to imagine that discrepancy could exist for completely un-sinister reasons.

Also, voter registration databases are open record.  If there were massive numbers of illegal immigrant voters, do you not think this would have been noticed?  That's exactly why I'm interested in hearing more about this Colorado study.  It's the only legitimate way of looking into these things...but it's tough to do on a systemic basis, so I'd like to hear about the methodology.