By Gabe Cohen, Fredreka Schouten, CNN
(CNN) — Former Census Bureau leaders, statisticians and voting-rights advocates are raising alarms about an unusual, unsigned new report posted on the agency’s website that claims tens of thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election.
President Donald Trump touted the results Tuesday on Truth Social, saying the bureau had proved that more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in 2020 after analyzing 128 million individual voter records.
“I WON THE ELECTION!” Trump wrote, repeating his unsubstantiated claim that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 race. He predicted the number would “explode” once analysts processed the remaining 32 million voter records.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, later posted, “It’s just the beginning,” predicting the next analysis “will likely show tens of thousands of additional illegal voters.”
Even if the report is accurate, 24,000 votes would amount to less than 0.02% of the roughly 160 million ballots cast in 2020. Joe Biden won the national popular vote by more than 7 million votes.
The findings fall well below Biden’s victory margins in the most closely contested states:
Arizona: 1,100 alleged noncitizen votes; Biden won by 10,457 Georgia: 400 alleged noncitizen votes; Biden won by 11,779 Wisconsin: 500 alleged noncitizen votes; Biden won by 20,682The report also does not — and cannot — say which candidates those voters supported because ballot selections are secret.
The disputed findings come amid growing concern about political pressure on the Census Bureau, which has traditionally been led by career statisticians and operated independently of the White House.
Earlier this year, the administration installed a group of partisan analysts from the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute inside the Census Bureau, according to three former bureau officials who served under Trump. AFPI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Census Bureau, Commerce Department and White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The administration has intensified its effort to find evidence backing Trump’s longstanding claims of widespread voter fraud. In a primetime address last month, Trump cited a trove of newly declassified documents to claim the US election system has gaping vulnerabilities that leave future contests open to foreign interference and widespread noncitizen voting.
‘Fatal’ flaws: Experts question study’s process
The Census Bureau analysis compared a commercial voter database with federal records from the IRS, Social Security Administration, State Department and Department of Homeland Security, according to the document released Tuesday.
The commercial data came from Data-Clear, a Virginia-based firm that received a $649,500 federal contract in 2024 to obtain voter registration data, federal records show.
Analysts used the Census Bureau’s system for linking the records, searching for individual voters who match noncitizen records in the federal government databases.
Tuesday’s report, dubbed a “beginning analysis,” immediately raised red flags among former senior Census Bureau officials. Publishing such a document without named authors or contributors is highly unusual, they said, and could indicate that career staff were sidelined.
John M. Abowd, the bureau’s chief scientist from 2016 to 2022, told CNN the report’s statistical finding is too small to distinguish from routine matching errors and claim as definitive proof of noncitizen voters.
Record-linking systems can produce false matches, even when they are well designed, he said. The 24,000 noncitizen matches represent about 0.019% of the 128 million records that were analyzed.
“None of the professional researchers that I knew or worked with at the Census Bureau would make such a claim from that study,” Abowd said. “Professional researchers would have reported that result and given it some context.”
Former Census Bureau Director Robert Santos, who held the role from 2022 until resigning in the first days of Trump’s second term, described the publication as an obvious “hijack by the White House.”
“I was shocked and dismayed that a document of this sort – and I refuse to call it a report – would appear on a Census Bureau website,” Santos told CNN. “It is clearly a product of White House and Department of Commerce analysts.”
He said another “fatal flaw” of the analysis is that it rests on a faulty assumption: that federal, state and local records are completely accurate.
Voter files often contain outdated or incorrect information. Those problems may have been worse during the Covid-19 pandemic, when election offices faced shutdowns, staffing shortages and other disruptions.
“There’s every reason to believe that the quality of the data that’s being used is highly suspect, because it was not business as usual when those data were being developed,” Santos told CNN.
A typical bureau analysis would spell out those caveats and limitations, the former officials said. Tuesday’s document did not.
Broader fears of political interference
Lutnick’s department has taken on a growing role in Trump’s push to root out alleged voter fraud and reshape federal election rules. He stood beside Trump in the Oval Office as the president signed an executive order in March directing his administration to compile state-by-state citizenship lists and ordering the Postal Service to step up scrutiny of mail ballots.
Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said he was working with Lutnick to use federal funding as leverage to pressure states to adopt Trump-backed election reforms.
“Meaning that if these states want a grant and they want to be reimbursed to run federal elections, they’re going to have to implement security issues,” Mullin told reporters.
The administration has increasingly tapped federal databases to bolster its search for noncitizen voting. Last month, Mullin claimed DHS had reviewed public voter rolls and found more than 250,000 potential noncitizens registered across New Jersey, Nevada, California and Pennsylvania — a figure some officials in those states disputed, demanding details about how DHS calculated it.
“It’s the same old story of using flawed databases and ways to generate a storyline that the president will like, but actually doesn’t align with reality,” said Andrew Walchuk, Policy Director and Counsel for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, a non-partisan voting-rights advocacy organization.
Walchuk called the latest Census Bureau report a “farce” intended to undermine trust in elections.
Concerns about false-positives
The voter information that Data-Clear obtained from states and provided to the Census Bureau included dates of birth where available but not Social Security numbers, Data-Clear’s President Carolyn Carlson told CNN.
Experts questioned whether the analysis of that data contained enough specific information about individual voters to guard against false-positive results.
Trump’s Justice Department has sued 30 states in an effort to obtain unredacted voter records, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, but has been repeatedly rebuffed by the courts. The states fighting the DOJ cite federal and state privacy laws that they say protect voters’ personal information.
Carlson said the firm had no control or input into how the Census analyzed the data the firm provided and referred questions about the report’s findings to the agency.
Michael McDonald, an elections expert at the University of Florida, said the numbers cited in the Census report likely include people who are in fact US citizens. “We should treat these 24,000 as allegations, not as definitive proof of noncitizens,” he said.
“Election officials know that there are pitfalls in the data where individuals may be alleged to be a noncitizen but are actually indeed a citizen, and they can provide proof of their citizenship,” he said.
Typically, local election officials will reach out to the voters to give them an opportunity to provide evidence that they are qualified to remain on the voting rolls before removing their names, he added.
“This alleged analysis based on Census data fails the laugh test,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who now oversees the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Census data cannot be reliably matched to public voter data, as it lacks any unique matching identifiers to compare to those public voter records.”
CNN’s Ethan Cohen contributed to this report.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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