The U.S. Census Bureau released topline findings this week of an analysis of data that it claims allowed it to “readily determine[] with high confidence” that 24,000 voters in the 2020 general election were noncitizens, of a sample of 128 million voters (32 million short of the total who cast ballots that November).
The Bureau said it drew from a combination of sources, including commercially available voter records and federal agencies that maintain immigrant data, which, it argued, “makes it uniquely capable of compiling and publishing statistics on election crime and other forms of fraud.” Its report, “Non-Citizen Voting in the 2020 Election, A Beginning Analysis,” is the latest example of the Trump administration repurposing an existing program or agency to investigate the scale of noncitizen voting, in addition to the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE tool and its Homeland Security Investigations unit, which ProPublica reported about in a piece published last Friday.
The federal government’s involvement in this issue is now so widespread that I wanted to ask a state-level official — the level of government at which voter rolls are maintained and the election process is overseen — for thoughts about the sourcing of this kind of federal-led investigation. Gabriel Sterling, who was the Chief Operating Officer for the Georgia Secretary of State, now leads special projects there, and will soon be joining Declare as a contributor, shared his by email.
“I am intrigued, but left with many questions,” he began. True to that statement, he had six in total. They were:
- Why release a partial report? [The Census Bureau] reviewed 128 million records, with 32 million more to go. It’s by their own admission, incomplete.
- There is no explanation of how the 2020 voting flags are managed from the commercial data. If someone voted in 2020 in Texas and subsequently moved and registered in Colorado, are they counted as a Texas or Colorado potential non-citizen voter?
- The analysis does not discuss derived citizens. Federal law, specifically 8 U.S.C.§1431, has been on the books for over a quarter century. It essentially allows for children of naturalized citizens to be citizens. There is not necessarily a record to confirm or check against; many derived citizens never file an N-400 Form, nor take a naturalization oath, nor receive a Certificate of Citizenship.
- There appears to be a default to completeness of administrative records. For those of us that live in the real world, we understand that over 100 million plus records, working to manage matching through 100 million plus other records, there are bound to be data errors. This is not discussed.
- There [are] no false positive ratings given. With this much data, there are likely false positives. Whether that amount is large or small cannot be determined from this report.
- The number of potential non-citizens identified is 24,000. That is an incredibly small percent based on the 128 million records reviewed. It comes to less than two hundredths of a percent. While any non-citizen voting is bad, this amount is so small as to have no effect on the final outcome.
Gabriel mentioned that the third question in that list, about the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, can be especially tricky when trying to compile all the records necessary to make a strong determination about the total number of noncitizen voters. It’s a lesson from his time with the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, which has released findings from its own noncitizen voting investigations.
His ultimate takeaway? “[E]ven with a wide net, false positives at an unknown level, derived citizens either unaccounted for [or] unexplained in the analysis, and an assumption of relatively complete data, there was not nearly enough non-citizen voting to affect the final outcome of the 2020 election.”
A finding that’s consistent with the data we’ve compiled from several state-led audits in our Election Integrity Map, which you can read over (and bookmark!) here.