No. of Recommendations: 13
Trump Couldn't Find Voter Fraud, So He Made It Up
Earlier this week, the bureau published a seven-page report claiming that more than 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 election. Trump jumped on it immediately, posting that the report proves he won in 2020 and predicting the numbers will, quote, “explode,” as more records get processed.
But here’s what Trump didn’t mention. The report has no author, which former bureau officials say is unheard of for an agency built on layers of review. It doesn’t explain its methodology. And according to reporting from NPR and CNN, it wasn’t produced by the bureau’s career statisticians at all. It came from partisan analysts the administration installed from the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by Trump’s own former officials.
The experts who work with this stuff every day are being pretty blunt about it. David Becker, one of the country’s leading election lawyers, put it this way: “This analysis is laughable. Census data cannot reliably be matched to voter data.” And even if you took the report at face value, 24,000 votes out of 128 million is about two hundredths of one percent.
Even Republicans aren’t buying it. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, ran an intensive audit in 2024 and found fewer than a dozen noncitizens who had ever voted in his state. This report claims Georgia had 400 in 2020 alone. So this week, Raffensperger wrote to the bureau with a simple request: show me the names.
Nevada’s a good example of what happens when these numbers actually get checked. Last month, Homeland Security claimed nearly 16,000 noncitizens were registered to vote there. This week, on a recorded call with state election officials, DHS’s own staff admitted they had confirmed just 185 potential noncitizens and hadn’t even reviewed more than 14,000 of the names on their list.
This is the playbook. Announce a giant number, stamp a federal seal on it, and hope nobody reads the fine print. The 2030 census depends on every American trusting this agency, and this President is burning that trust to prop up a six-year-old lie.
Adam Kinzinger
