We have had a lot of interest in the work we’ve done following the numbers of non-citizen registrant removals by the VA department of election (ELECT). I recently got asked a follow up question as to how those numbers broke out with respect to estimated party leaning for each of the 435 identified non-citizen voters. The method for performing this calculation is presented below. The majority (~77%) could not be associated with either party as they either did not have Primary Election voting history or the computation resulted in a neutral score. There were approximately ~21% with DEM party leaning and only ~2% with REP party leaning.
Method:
VA does not have registration by party, so there is no direct method for knowing a registrants party affiliation. However, for the subset of voters that have voted in party primaries, we can calculate a “leaning” score in a couple of different ways:
Leaning_v1 : This method uses the weighted average of the elections each voter has participated in, with Democratic primaries weighted as +1, and Republican primaries weighted as -1, and all other elections weighted as 0.
Leaning_v2: This method computes the voter leaning as the difference in the ratios of how often a voter participates in either a Dem or Rep primary, with a positive result meaning higher Dem, and a negative result meaning a higher Rep score.
Using the results that we presented previously, we have computed the Leaning scores for each identified non-citizen voter and computed the percentage of the non-citizen voters that fall into each category of Republican, Democrat or Unknown. Both methods of computing the leaning give slightly different, but consistent, results.
Results:
Leaning_v1 of Distinct Identified Non-Citizen Voters:
| Category | Percent | Count |
| Republican (score<0) Leaning_v1 Non-Citizen Voters | 1.38% | 6 |
| Unknown (score=0) Leaning_v1 Non-Citizen Voters | 77.7% | 338 |
| Democrat (score>0) Leaning_v1 Non-Citizen Voters | 20.92% | 91 |
Leaning_v2 of Distinct Identified Non-Citizen Voters:
| Category | Percent | Count |
| Republican (score<0) Leaning_v2 Non-Citizen Voters | 2.07% | 9 |
| Unknown (score=0) Leaning_v2 Non-Citizen Voters | 77.01% | 335 |
| Democrat (score>0) Leaning_v2 Non-Citizen Voters | 20.92% | 91 |