Kenneth Glad
Election experts and state officials are challenging how government records were used to assess participation in the 2020 election. The dispute comes ahead of this fall’s U.S. midterm elections.
A Census Bureau analysis promoted by President Donald Trump is drawing criticism from election specialists who question whether its methodology can establish illegal voting.
The bureau says its initial review covered more than 128 million voter records and determined with “high confidence” that more than 24,000 represented noncitizens at the time of the 2020 election. More than 32 million records still had to be analyzed.
Trump has presented that figure as proof that more than 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally. Experts interviewed by NPR questioned whether voter files and federal citizenship records can be linked reliably enough to support that conclusion.
Experts examine data matching
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told NPR: “This analysis is laughable. Census data cannot reliably be matched to voter data.”
Michael Morse, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school who studies voter registration records, told the outlet that incomplete naturalization information, outdated records and missing unique identifiers could produce incorrect links between databases.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has asked the Census Bureau for information supporting its estimate that 400 noncitizens voted in Georgia in 2020. A 2024 state review identified 20 noncitizens among 8.2 million registered voters, with nine found to have previously voted, according to NPR.
Scrutiny reaches report authorship
Nevada officials have also criticized the absence of supporting evidence. Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said federal claims about noncitizen voting had been released without publicly showing how the figures were reached.
NPR separately reported that career Census Bureau employees did not conduct the analysis and that people affiliated with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute participated in the work. The bureau, White House and institute did not respond to NPR requests for comment.
Amy O’Hara, former chief of the Census Bureau’s Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications, told NPR that irregularities should not automatically be considered evidence of wrongdoing, noting that “those anomalies aren’t necessarily fraud.”
Sources: NPR; U.S. Census Bureau
