NO STATISTICIAN OR researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau attached their name to yesterday’s report stating that 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 election, and that should tell you something. Every other report on the bureau’s “Census Publications” site is credited to a statistician, economist, demographer or researcher.
Then again, few Census Bureau publications are ever used as evidence by the president of the United States to claim an election was stolen. But that’s exactly what President Donald Trump did yesterday, proclaiming on “Truth Social” that he had won the 2020 presidential election. Just to be clear, Trump lost to President Joe Biden by 7 million votes in an election in which 160 million voters cast ballots.
The Census Bureau report, “Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election, A Beginning Analysis,” says that its “beginning” analysis determined with certainty that over 128 million citizens cast ballots and more than 24,000 noncitizens also voted. However, the report said the Census Bureau still has 32 million voter records to analyze.
“The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode,” Trump wrote. “I WON THIS ELECTION!”
Trump was sending a message to Republicans in Congress to pass the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID at the time of voting.
Instances of noncitizens voting are rare, and the Census Bureau numbers, so far, back that up – 0.018% of votes cast in the 2020 election. Also, 24,000 votes weren’t enough for Trump to overcome Biden’s lead.
There should be some concern with how the Census Bureau used administrative records to conduct this analysis. The voting data came from a compilation of state registration rolls and vote-history extracts, according to the report. The bureau also used its Person Identification Validation System that links anonymously a single person to a wide range of data sets from the federal government and surveys. It may sound Big Brotherish, but it can be used, among other things, to help fill in gaps in data collection in an age when people aren’t responding to surveys or answering their doors when census takers come knocking.
However, incomplete and mismatched records can inject bias into the statistics using the linked data. A 2014 Census Bureau study suggested that young children, minorities, immigrants and recent movers were less likely to have information that could be tagged into the system.
For the election study, the Census Bureau noted, “the team conducting this beginning analysis did not have access to the names of the population analyzed or any other identifying information.”
As it turns out, no names were attached to the Census Bureau report either.
Trump believes everyone likes him.