Donald Trump’s ongoing crusade to prove he “won” the 2020 presidential election now relies on a dubious Census Bureau report that claims thousands of noncitizens “voted illegally.” The unauthored, seven-page report posted on his Truth Social account this week doesn’t appear to come from the bureau’s own career civil servants but from people affiliated with the Trump-linked America First Policy Institute think tank, NPR discovered. Trump claimed that an analysis of 128 million voter records “proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally” and that the final number will “explode” after the bureau finishes processing 32 million other votes. Election law experts say the analysis relies on shoddy and opaque methodology that doesn’t even reach the conclusion that Trump thinks it does.
The report “fails the laugh test,” according to David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Trump appears to be pushing the Census report to support the Senate passage of his sweeping SAVE America Act after federal courts have largely blocked his executive orders imposing nationwide voter ID and restricting the use of mail-in ballots that election officials and voting rights groups argue would bring chaos to midterm election planning. Trump and administration officials have touted recent prosecutions of noncitizen voting as evidence of the scale of the alleged problem while accusing Democrats of either ignoring the issue or denying it exists.
Election officials and Democrats have not denied ineligible ballots have been cast; those voters are frequently caught and prosecuted. Assuming the numbers cited by Trump are accurate, 24,000 votes out of 128 million would represent less than .02 percent of all votes cast in 2020 — still far below the threshold to tip the scales for Trump’s victory. Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes.
The 2020 Census didn’t even collect information about citizenship status, and the bureau “does not have a comprehensive individual ‘citizenship records’ file to definitively match against voter rolls,” according to Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation strategy at Common Cause. The types of data used in its report “are modeled population estimates, not evidence that 24,000 people voted illegally,” he noted. Still, the Trump administration has pointed to several recent wider noncitizen voting scandals as evidence of a pervasive scheme.
New Jersey officials recently disclosed they had inadvertently registered thousands of noncitizens to vote because of a software error. Roughly 400 of those noncitizens cast ballots, according to the state. In a speech from the White House last month, Trump alleged without evidence that the Department of Homeland Security discovered 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in four states.
Those states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — have disputed the alleged findings and asked the administration for more details, which have not yet been disclosed. The Justice Department, meanwhile, has lost more than 20 lawsuits in its efforts to collect voter information. The administration claims it needs those records to ensure that states are adhering to federal laws that require voter registration records be up to date and accurate.
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