Trump ‘fails the laugh test,’ say critics, with push to weaponize the Census for ‘rigged’ elections

Donald Trump’s ongoing crusade to prove he “won” the 2020 presidential election now relies on a dubious Census Bureau report that claims thousands of noncitizens “voted illegally.”

The unauthored, seven-page report posted on his Truth Social account this week doesn’t appear to come from the bureau’s own career civil servants but from people affiliated with the Trump-linked America First Policy Institute think tank, NPR discovered.

Trump claimed that an analysis of 128 million voter records “proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally” and that the final number will “explode” after the bureau finishes processing 32 million other votes. “I WON THE ELECTION!” he wrote.

Election law experts say the analysis relies on shoddy and opaque methodology that doesn’t even reach the conclusion that Trump thinks it does. The report “fails the laugh test,” according to David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“The administration does not provide a sufficient explanation of how it arrived at these numbers — and for good reason,” he said in a statement shared with The Independent.

“Census data cannot be reliably matched to public voter data, as it lacks any unique matching identifiers to compare to those public voter records,” he said. “Any possible effort to ‘match’ such data would result in large numbers of false matches.”

In a statement celebrating the report, America First Policy Institute said it “maintains that maximizing transparency is a critical step to restoring confidence in our elections.”

The president, who continues to baselessly insist the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him, has increasingly turned to the issue of “ noncitizen voting ” in his attempts to seize control of election administration.

Trump appears to be pushing the Census report to support the Senate passage of his sweeping SAVE America Act after federal courts have largely blocked his executive orders imposing nationwide voter ID and restricting the use of mail-in ballots that election officials and voting rights groups argue would bring chaos to midterm election planning.

Trump and administration officials have touted recent prosecutions of noncitizen voting as evidence of the scale of the alleged problem while accusing Democrats of either ignoring the issue or denying it exists. Election officials and Democrats have not denied ineligible ballots have been cast; those voters are frequently caught and prosecuted.

Assuming the numbers cited by Trump are accurate, 24,000 votes out of 128 million would represent less than .02 percent of all votes cast in 2020 — still far below the threshold to tip the scales for Trump’s victory. Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes.

“It is good to see the administration now admit that these numbers are so small that they could not have altered the outcome of the 2020 election,” Becker said.