Noncitizen voting: experts question US Census report

A US Census Bureau report claiming that around 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election has drawn criticism from experts and former bureau officials, who questioned its methods and accuracy.

The analysis said with “high confidence” that more than 20,000 noncitizens voted in 2020. Noncitizen voting is illegal in federal elections. President Donald Trump has cited the report as evidence for his claims that his 2020 loss to Joe Biden was unlawful.

Former Census Bureau senior executive Amy O'Hara called the paper an abuse of the agency's reputation for high-quality analysis and pointed to a lack of attribution and other concerns about methods and research integrity.

NPR reported that the analysis was not carried out by career civil servants, but by a team that included people affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank started by officials from Trump's first administration.

The report compared federal administrative records that include immigration information with a nationwide voter file dataset provided by the Virginia-based company Data-Clear under a contract related to the 2030 census.

Data-Clear president Carolyn Carlson said the voter file records supplied by the company did not include citizenship status. She said Data-Clear played no role in the analysis.

Michael Morley, director of the Florida State University Election Law Center, said matching datasets can produce errors, especially if information was collected at different times during a changing process such as gaining US citizenship. “It would be a mistake for anybody to try to draw definite conclusions just based on the fact that two databases happen to match,” he said.

Experts said that even if all 24,000 votes were proven to have been cast by noncitizens, they would account for less than 0.02 percent of the roughly 160 million votes cast in 2020 and would not have changed the election outcome. They also said the records cannot show which candidate received any such ballots.