Trump falsely claimed a flawed, unauthored Census Bureau report proved over 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in 2020

On August 18, 2026, President Trump posted on Truth Social that a U.S. Census Bureau review of 2020 voter records "proves" more than 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally, adding that the number would "explode" once the Bureau finished checking 32 million more records, and called on Congress to pass the SAVE Act. The claim rested on an unauthored, seven-page Census Bureau brief titled "Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election, A Beginning Analysis," which matched roughly 128 million 2020 voter records against citizenship data and reported about 24,000 apparent noncitizen matches -- roughly 0.02% of votes cast. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed the report's release the same day, saying the Bureau's analysis showed "more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted" and that additional records "will likely show tens of thousands of additional illegal voters."

Former and outside Census experts said the report broke sharply from the Bureau's normal practice. Misty Heggeness, a former Bureau economist, and Amy O'Hara, a former chief of the Bureau's Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications, said the brief carried no named author, unusual for the agency, and lacked measures of variance, bias discussion, or an accounting of the mismatches that data-matching between voter files and other federal records routinely produces. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research called the analysis "laughable," and University of Pennsylvania law professor Michael Morse said the small apparent-match rate was fully consistent with known matching errors rather than actual illegal voting.

NPR reported that the analysis was not conducted by the Bureau's career civil servants, and that the working team included people affiliated with the America First Policy Institute -- a think tank founded by first-term Trump administration officials -- according to a Bureau employee NPR agreed not to name over fear of workplace retaliation. The report followed a Department of Homeland Security claim the previous month that 250,000 noncitizens were on voter rolls in four states, a figure DHS has also not explained its methodology for, and which officials in those states have publicly doubted.