Washington Post Fact Checks Itself to Whack Trump

On Monday, Eric Trump, the son of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, earned Four Pinocchios from The Washington Post’s fact-checking outfit — for using a statistic from a Washington Post-published blog.

The awarding of a Pinocchio indicates a degree of falsehood. Four Pinocchios is the highest degree of falsehood.

“We maintain that our data is the best currently available to answer the question and stand by our finding that some non-citizens have voted in recent elections.”

Apparently, The Post doesn’t have much faith in its Monkey Cage blog on political science.

Eric Trump earned the unkind distinction for using data from a 2014 scholarly article published in The Post’s Monkey Cage blog.

The trouble began on ABC News’ “This Week” Sunday, when Eric Trump said his father would concede a fair election.

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“My father will accept it 100 percent if it’s fair — if it’s fair,” Trump said. “Fourteen percent of all non-citizens in this country are registered to vote.”

Eric Trump was referring to an Oct. 24, 2014, article posted on The Post’s Monkey Cage blog by professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest.

In that scholarly article, Richman and Earnest wonder how many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections. Their research found: “More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.”

That conclusion is hotly contested by another set of researchers, who claim to have debunked it in a WaPo article on Oct. 19, 2016. They claim: “It is almost certainly the case that all of the non-citizen voters that they report are actually citizen voters who simply clicked the wrong box on the survey.”

But Richman stood by their work in a Post article on Nov. 2, 2014: “We maintain that our data is the best currently available to answer the question and stand by our finding that some non-citizens have voted in recent elections.”

Richman claims it is understandable why non-citizens would change their remarks in later studies, since their voting — and even registration — is illegal.

But The Washington Post didn’t accept that explanation and appears not to tolerate use of the original Richman-Earnest article on the campaign trail. The reporter for The Post’s Fact Checker was kind enough to respond to LifeZette’s questions on Tuesday.

“The Trump campaign is using the information in this Monkey Cage post to support their claims about the potential or actual impact of noncitizen and/or illegal immigrant voting,” said Post reporter Michelle Lee in an email. “It is the burden of the campaign to vet the data they are using … If the campaign reached out to the researcher of the study (as I have), the researcher would have told them that his data do not support the campaign’s claims, as he told me — and as he wrote in a blog post.”

Except Richman’s recent blog post is hardly a full retreat.

“We found low but non-zero levels of non-citizen participation in elections,” Richman writes on his Old Dominion University blog. “These levels are sufficient to change the outcomes in extremely close elections, as we illustrated in the paper.”

Lee also distanced the Monkey Cage from The Post.

“[It] is an independent blog housed on washingtonpost.com and is not a Washington Post product,” Lee said.

Eric Trump’s biggest problem may be expanding the 14 percent figure from the sample to the nation. No one appears to have claimed that, and Trump maybe should earn a rebuke for that. He should have qualified his remarks to a sample.

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But still — should Eric Trump have gotten the full Four Pinocchios for citing research that the professors still stand by, generally speaking, and is still posted on The Post’s (independent) blog?

Lee said Eric Trump got it because his father got it, too.

“When I looked up this 14 percent figure after Eric Trump said it in the interview, I realized it’s the exact same data and figure that Donald Trump had used earlier in the week,” Lee said. “I had given Four Pinocchios to Donald Trump then for using this Monkey Cage study to make his point, and I applied the same standard to Eric Trump.”

Lee concluded her Monday article with an appeal to skepticism: “If a statistic sounds too fantastic to be true, then it’s probably false.”

Even if it’s on a Post-affiliated political science blog, apparently.