Jesse Richman

Jesse Richman is an associate professor of political science and geography at Old Dominion University. His research has focused on legislative politics, public opinion, electoral politics, and intellectual property. He is known for his 2014 study with David Earnest about illegal non-citizen voting, which was widely rejected by the broader academic community Richman's expert testimony on noncitizen voting in Fish v. Kobach was widely criticized while his expert testimony in Arizona received mixed reviews.

Education Richman received a Bachelor of Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1999, a Master of Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Carnegie Mellon in 2005.

2014 study with David Earnest

Before the 2014 study (and after) there was a virtual consensus in academia that noncitizen voting did not exist on any functional level. Richman stood by his report,

Criticism A 2015 study of the same data by CCES coordinators Stephen Ansolabehere, Brian Schaffner and Samantha Luks, published in the same journal, found no evidence of noncitizen voting. Researchers found that at most, one survey respondent was a non-citizen voter, though even that could be due to a false match to a voter record. Brian Schaffner wrote about Richman's study, "I can say unequivocally that this research is not only wrong, it is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place. There is no evidence that non-citizens have voted in recent U.S. elections."

200 political scientists signed an open letter saying Richman's study should "not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting." Richard Hasen in 2020 said, "one wonders how Richman's paper got published." Snopes described the paper as "wildly discredited." Wendy Weiser and Douglas Keith described the study as "thoroughly debunked." Spenser Mestel commented on how unusual it was for Richman to make such broad claims and express so much certainty about his results at the time, which is not typical in studies on voting behavior that are heavily qualified and narrow. The CCES sent out a newsletter encouraging researchers not to use their data the way that Richman and Earnest did. When the survey was rerun by different researchers and the people who answered the citizenship question differently were removed as presumably having misclicked the survey result in the earlier survey, the researchers found 0 non-citizens who voted.

Use by others The study was cited, often improperly, by conservative news and conspiracy theory websites, A self-described political moderate, Richman sometimes regrets publishing the study given how it has been a cornerstone of Trump's claims of voter fraud and hopes that decisions on what to do about voter fraud are made on the totality of research and not just one cherry-picked study, even if it's the one he published. Richman had extrapolated from "having discovered six noncitizens on a list of Kansans with temporary drivers' licenses who 'either registered to vote or attempted to register to vote." Richard Hasen called parts of Richman's testimony "social science at its worst".

U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton wrote in her ruling on the case that "the Court found Dr. Richman’s testimony credible and affords his opinions considerable weight." Justin Levitt, who had been skeptical of Richman's earlier research on the topic, said "while the CES data here does look to me to be more reliable than Prof. Richman's prior forays, I'd need some more information before I believed it were reliable" and posited that non-citizen turnout could be lower than Richman estimated. Brian Schaffner "rejects the use of the CES to study noncitizens entirely," one of the techniques used by Richman to claim significant noncitizen voting in Arizona.

Writing Richman has written opinion pieces for The Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post.

Books Richman has co-authored two books on international trade:

Trading Away Our Future: How to Fix Our Government-Driven Trade Deficits and Faulty Tax System Before it's Too Late in 2008 Balanced Trade: Ending the Unbearable Costs of America's Trade Deficits in 2014.