This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
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President Donald Trump this week unveiled another effort by his administration to raise questions about the outcome of the 2020 election he lost: an unusual U.S. Census Bureau analysis concluding with “high confidence” that 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election.
Trump touted the finding on social media and wrote that it supports his long-running false claims that he actually won the 2020 election.
But experts said there are substantial questions about the Census Bureau study’s methodology and validity. And even if 24,000 noncitizens had voted in 2020, it wouldn’t have been enough to change the election’s outcome.
The seven-page Census Bureau report said researchers examined more than 128 million voters in the 2020 presidential election and determined with “high confidence” that more than 24,000 of them were noncitizens. If so, that number would be less than 0.019% of the sample.
Trump said census researchers are still analyzing another 32 million voters and predicted that the number of illegal noncitizen votes would “explode” after that was done.
The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. But experts said some aspects of the bureau’s release raise fundamental questions.
Most Census Bureau reports identify the authors of the report and detail the reliability of the data they are using. This analysis did neither.
“A properly done Census report would have had that information and the fact that it is missing is glaring and makes me think that they are hiding something,” said Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute who has worked as a contractor on Census Bureau reports.
Terri Ann Lowenthal, who served as staff director for the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee overseeing the Census Bureau from 1987 to 1994, said the report’s minimal methodological information raised questions about the accuracy of the results.
Lowenthal said the report was “beneath the Census Bureau’s stellar reputation.” The failure to include the names of any career staff members, she said, suggested that the work may have been done by someone with a political agenda “and may not reflect the sound, reputable analysis for which the Census Bureau is known.”
Trump administration searches for noncitizen voters
Trump has focused the efforts of his second administration on rooting out voter fraud, especially any instance of illegal voting by noncitizens, which audits, investigations, and studies have found happens only rarely. But the federal government doesn’t possess a comprehensive database of citizens, and efforts to match different data sets have so far yielded inaccurate results.
The administration pushed states to run millions of records of registered voters through a revamped federal data tool to check if they were citizens. But election officials found the system, which cross-referenced federal records from various federal agencies, in some cases erroneously flagged citizens. In June, a federal judge blocked the use of the overhauled tool, finding it threatened privacy and voting rights.
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In a televised primetime speech on July 16, Trump said his administration had found more than 250,000 noncitizen voters on the voter rolls of just four states: New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Officials in all four states pushed back on Trump’s claims and said they didn’t understand how the administration arrived at those numbers. The Trump administration has yet to provide any detail on its methodology in that case either.
The president has lobbied for federal legislation to require people registering to vote to prove their citizenship, and he repeated that call when releasing the Census Bureau findings Tuesday, describing it as his highest legislative priority. But the effort has stalled in the U.S. Senate. He has also released two sweeping executive orders on elections, but their major provisions have been so far blocked by federal courts.
Questions surround Trump administration’s data analysis
The voting data used in the analysis was provided by Data-Clear, a business in Virginia that secured an $885,000 Census Bureau contract from former President Joe Biden’s administration in 2024. Carolyn Carlson, Data-Clear’s president and founder, said she provided nationwide voting data to the bureau that year as part of a project to try and prevent an undercount of minority voters in the 2030 census.
Carlson said she was surprised to see the data she provided used in the new review of noncitizen voters.
The report says the Census Bureau matched the Data-Clear voter files with federal immigration records to determine if people were citizens and eligible to vote. The report offers only general descriptions of how and when it was able to match verifiable information.
Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who worked in the Biden White House on voting rights issues, said a typical analysis would include caveats around the possible margin of error, and the 24,000 figure for noncitizen voters could be within it. However, the Census Bureau report doesn’t specify one.
“In most statistical exercises, it’s not unthinkable that there might be 0.019% false positives – and if that were the case here, that would turn the total conclusions to zero,” he said.
Should the analysis hold up to scrutiny, the underlying numbers showed that they would not involve enough voters to change the result of the 2020 election. The report said it found 500 noncitizens illegally cast ballots in Wisconsin, which Trump lost to Biden by more than 20,000 votes. The survey said it identified 1,100 noncitizens who cast ballots in Arizona, which Trump lost by more than 10,000 votes. And the report cannot say whether those voters supported Trump or Biden.
In response to questions about whether the release supported the president’s assertion, the White House responded with a link to a social media post by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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