How Much Double Voting Across Two States? Not Much

See this working paper by Goel, Meredith, Morse, Rothschild, and Shirani-Mehr. Abstract:

There are more than two million cases in a national voter le in which 2012 vote records share a common fi rst name, last name, and date of birth. We develop a probabilistic birthdate model to estimate how many of these cases represent the same person voting twice. If voter les are a completely accurate account of who voted, we estimate about 0.02% of the votes cast in 2012 were double votes. An audit of poll books, however, suggests that many of these apparent double votes represent measurement error when recording turnout in voter les. Nevertheless, concerns about double voting have led many states to participate in the Interstate Crosscheck Program, which promotes purging registration records that share a common name and date of birth. We fi nd their proposed purging strategy would eliminate about 200 registrations used to cast legitimate votes for every one registration used to cast a double vote.

 

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