Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to prove he ‘won’ the 2020 presidential election have led him to rely on a dubious report claiming an analysis of 128 million voter records ‘proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally.’ The unauthored report, posted on his Truth Social account, appears to come from people affiliated with the Trump-linked America First Policy Institute think tank, rather than the bureau’s own career civil servants. Trump exclaimed, ‘I WON THE ELECTION!’ However, election law experts say the analysis relies on shoddy and opaque methodology that doesn’t even reach the conclusion that Trump thinks it does. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, stated that the report ‘fails the laugh test.’ He explained that the administration does not provide a sufficient explanation of how it arrived at these numbers, and that Census data cannot be reliably matched to public voter data due to the lack of unique matching identifiers.
Any possible effort to ‘match’ such data would result in large numbers of false matches. Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation strategy at Common Cause, noted that 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.’ The types of data used in its report ‘are modeled population estimates, not evidence that 24,000 people voted illegally,’ he said. Assuming the numbers cited by Trump are accurate, 24,000 votes out of 128 million would represent less than 0.02 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. Becker noted that it is good to see the administration now admit that these numbers are so small that they could not have altered the outcome of the 2020 election. The Trump administration has pointed to several recent noncitizen voting scandals as evidence of a pervasive scheme, including a software error in New Jersey that inadvertently registered thousands of noncitizens to vote.
However, experts argue that these incidents do not provide evidence of widespread voter fraud. The Justice Department has lost more than 20 lawsuits in its efforts to collect voter information, and federal courts have repeatedly blocked the president’s sweeping executive order that sought to create a national voter registration list. Election officials and Democrats have expressed concerns that the administration’s efforts to restrict ballot access and purge voters from lists could lead to chaos and disenfranchisement, especially for voters with disabilities and those in rural areas.
The Supreme Court has been asked to reject the president’s efforts to implement far-reaching restrictions on ballot access, citing the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes. Nearly two dozen state attorneys general wrote to the court, ‘The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme.’
