A U.S. Census Report on Noncitizen Voting Used Bad Data to Reach Faulty Conclusions

A report published last month by the U.S. Census Bureau purported to uncover evidence backing up President Donald Trump's false claims that noncitizens voting cost him the 2020 election. It was the latest salvo in Trump's broader assault on the safety of U.S. elections. "I WON THE ELECTION,"* Trump quickly declared on Truth Social after the report's publication.

However, though Trump and other government officials quickly shared and praised the report, a WIRED investigation has uncovered significant flaws in the data used to compile the report, as well as in the approval process used prior to publication. WIRED has also learned that a number of the report's authors have links to the Trump administration and the Republican party. They include one former affiliate of Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and two researchers from the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a highly influential think tank founded by veterans of Trump's first administration.

The report, titled "Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election: A Beginning Analysis," claims that an analysis of more than 128 million voter records from the 2020 election identified 24,000 people tied to administrative records indicating noncitizen status. The numbers range from 4,300 in California to fewer than 15 in Wyoming—not nearly enough to have affected the outcome of the presidential race. But even these figures seem extremely questionable, and experts and Census Bureau employees who spoke to WIRED allege it is much likelier they represent basic analytical errors than actual instances of noncitizen voting.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.

*Grammatical errors related to capitalization and punctuation were not rectified by OSAP.