President Trump is joined by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the Census Bureau, as he speaks in the White House's Oval Office in 2025.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
hide caption
A highly unusual Census Bureau report that President Trump is using to reup dubious claims of widespread illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens has ties to a Trump-aligned think tank, NPR has learned.
In a social media post Tuesday, Trump claimed that the bureau's initial analysis of more than 128 million voter records "proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally" in the 2020 presidential election and that the final number will "explode" after the statistical agency finishes checking over 32 million more voter records.
The unauthored, seven-page report says it draws on a 2020 commercial voter file and various federal administrative records, but data and election experts say the report is questionable in its methodology and conclusions.
Work on the analysis was not conducted by career civil servants at the Census Bureau, and the team behind it included individuals affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank started by officials from Trump's first administration, according to a Census Bureau employee who NPR has agreed not to name because they fear retaliation at work.
Spokespeople for the bureau, the America First Policy Institute and the White House did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
But AFPI highlighted the analysis in a social media post Tuesday, saying that the think tank "maintains that maximizing transparency is a critical step to restoring confidence in our elections."
Trump continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was rigged, and in the final stretch before this fall's midterm election has urged his Republican allies in Congress to pass sweeping new voting restrictions.
The numbers from the Census Bureau report join a growing list of figures the Trump administration has released in recent months. The figures use disputed or unknown methodology in an attempt to quantify noncitizen voting in federal races, a problem many studies and audits show is incredibly rare.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had found 250,000 noncitizens on public voter rolls in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but it has yet to publicly disclose how it made those calculations. And election officials in those states expressed doubts about the accuracy of the claims.
The latest numbers from the Census Bureau report have also drawn pushback from election experts.
"This analysis is laughable. Census data cannot reliably be matched to voter data," David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said in a text exchange with NPR. "That said, it's good to see the president admit these numbers are so small that they couldn't have changed the outcome in 2020."
Using figures from the initial analysis, some 24,000 votes out of 128 million is just shy of 0.02%.
Michael Morse, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's law school who has researched voter registration files, echoed Becker's criticism over email, writing: "I'd expect that the Census data matching [exercise] is plagued by the lack of unique identifiers in voter records and outdated or incomplete naturalization records. But the brief's lack of transparency makes it difficult to pin down each problem or trust any explanation. Regardless, the estimated rate of apparent non-citizen voting is both a tiny fraction of total votes … and entirely consistent with both types of error."
Former employees of the Census Bureau are also raising alarms about the report.