Claim and verdict
Claim: A Census Bureau report proves that more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 presidential election.
Verdict: Unsupported and misleading.
President Trump has promoted a Census Bureau report as proof that thousands of noncitizens voted illegally in 2020. However, election and Census experts questioned the report’s methodology and said its findings cannot support that conclusion.
Read the source: AFP Fact Check: Experts question the Census Bureau report ↗
Why the data do not prove the claim
The analysis compared government immigration information with a private voter-history database. That voter file did not independently establish citizenship, and some government records may not have reflected people who became naturalized citizens before voting.
Experts also warned that name-and-address matching can produce false matches, particularly when databases contain outdated information or people share similar names. The expected number of possible mismatches may exceed the number of cases identified by the analysis.
The report also did not establish which candidate any individual supported. Even if all 24,000 records represented illegal ballots—which has not been demonstrated—they would equal less than 0.02% of nearly 160 million votes cast.
There is no verified evidence that noncitizen voting changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. A government-branded report should not be treated as proof when its underlying data and assumptions cannot establish the claim being made.