In his most recent challenge to the results of the 2020 U.S. election, President Donald Trump this week cited a report claiming to show that thousands of noncitizens voted, a practice studies have found to be extremely rare.
Trump's Truth Social post on Tuesday referenced a report published by the U.S. Census Bureau that he said checked “Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records,” finding 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in just its
initial search. The report is described as a “beginning analysis.”
But experts say its methodology is flawed and could have created many false positives.
Here's a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: A Census Bureau report looking at 128 million voters proves that more than 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 election.
THE FACTS: This is false. The report says it checked data from a commercial voter file against federal records to identify noncitizens who allegedly voted in the election. According to experts, the methodology described in the report may have created false positives if, for example, an individual's name was linked to the wrong address or their citizenship status hadn't been updated in a certain database. Details about error rates and how the report ensured accurate results were not included.
“This is the weakest methodology description I've ever seen in a Census Bureau publication,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology. “This document doesn't tell us anything about elections. It just shows that the Census Bureau has gone off the rails.”
He added that the Census Bureau is not clear about which databases it used in its analysis, which he said “exists essentially as a propaganda offering,” and that it does not explain likely sources of errors.
According to the seven-page report, out of nearly 160 million voter records from the 2020 election reviewed so far, more than 24,000 voters “are linked to administrative records that indicate with a high degree of confidence noncitizen status” at the time of the election. More than 32 million voter records are awaiting analysis.
Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount University who served as the senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights under the Biden administration, wrote of the report in a blog post, “There are three potential sources of error in that analysis: potential errors in the private vendor's voter file, potential errors in the federal records, and potential errors in the matching process itself, known in the trade as record linkage.”
Individuals may have been falsely identified as noncitizen voters due to myriad possible flaws in the data, Lindeman said. For example, there may be people living at the same address who share the same name or birthday. People with similar names could have been assigned the other's birthday. And a voter's citizenship status might not have been updated in the data the Census Bureau used to determine that status.
Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Elections Research Center and a professor of political science, agreed that the report lacks credibility.
“The Census Bureau report does meet the standards of rigor and transparency that historically made the agency a trusted authority,” he said. “Contrary to other Census publications, this report is unsigned, is described merely as a ‘beginning’ analysis, and relies on data from an unfamiliar private company. Necessary methodological details such as exactly how a ‘high-quality’ data match was defined are missing entirely.”
Trump also claimed in his Truth Social post, as he has numerous times before, that he won the 2020 election. He urged the passage of the SAVE America Act, which would require people to show documentary proof of citizenship before they register to vote, as well as impose voter ID requirements nationwide. The measure has passed the U.S. House but has not been voted on in the Senate, where even some Republicans oppose it.
Even if the number of noncitizen voters the report allegedly identified was correct and all of them voted for a candidate other than Trump, it would have hardly made a dent in the outcome of the 2020 election, which Trump did not win.
There were 158,429,631 votes cast for president that year, according to Federal Election Commission records. The 24,000 supposed noncitizen voters identified by the Census Bureau represents .015% of the total vote and .018% of the records the Census Bureau says it has reviewed so far. Former President Joe Biden received 7,059,526 more votes than Trump.
“All of the numbers cited in the Census analysis are smaller than the margins of victory in each state and would not have been enough to change the winner of any state in 2020,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Asked how the administration knows the Census Bureau's report is accurate, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said: “President Trump is right: Non-citizens are voting in our elections. Despite the media and Democrats claiming it never happens, the evidence of non-citizens registering and voting in our elections continues to pile up.”
The Census Bureau did not respond to requests for comment.
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