President Donald Trump lost the popular vote in the 2020 election by 4.4%. That hasn’t stopped him, though, from latching on to a highly unusual Census Bureau report published Tuesday afternoon that allegedly found less than two-hundredths of a percent of voters in that presidential election were noncitizens.

According to the report, 24,000 out of 128 million voters in the 2020 presidential election were ineligible “non-citizen” voters. Unnamed authors of the seven-page report, partially titled “A Beginning Analysis,” said the bureau still has to analyze 32 million voter records. According to Pew, some 158.4 million ballots were cast in the 2020 election. The Census Bureau’s report found 159.9 million ballots were cast in the election.

“The Census Bureau’s library of administrative records makes it uniquely capable of compiling and publishing statistics on election crime and other forms of fraud,” the report concludes, echoing the Trump administration’s prior attempts to link election and social service spending fraud to immigration.

The Census Bureau report comes after Trump has sought to lean on the statistical agency to uphold his administration’s monomaniacal goal of delegitimizing the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump used the report’s findings to urge the passing of the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter suppression bill that Trump has been pressuring Congress to pass for months, but which does not have widespread support even among Republicans  in Congress. 

“On the first 128,000,000 Voters,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 non-citizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!”

Howard Lutnick, the secretary of the Department of Commerce, under which the Census Bureau falls, backed his boss in a post on X touting the report.

Experts have told TPM that there is “absolutely no basis” to Trump and the MAGA movement’s claims about noncitizen voting. Trump and Republicans have been propping up conspiracy theories about noncitizens voting en masse for Democrats in federal elections for years. Nevermind that the findings of Tuesday’s Census Bureau report obviously does not support any claim that the 2020 election was somehow rigged by a crush of ineligible, noncitizen voters. The bureau’s analysis diverts from normal operations in several ways, researchers and public data experts said Tuesday, which makes the veracity of its findings impossible to confirm.

“It lacks transparency and accountability,” Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow in demographic and socioeconomic analysis at the Georgetown University Massive Data Institute, told TPM.

Neither the Census Bureau nor the Commerce Department immediately responded to TPM requests for comment.

The Census Bureau used a roll of private voter data, compared with various federal data sources, to substantiate its finding. That’s unprecedented, Jarosz said.

“[O]ne of the red flags in the report is that the Census Bureau, when they start to use a new data source, typically goes through a very extensive process of trying to understand the data quality,” Jarosz said. “And I don’t see any evidence that they did that.”

On X, Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation strategy at Common Cause, said the Census Bureau doesn’t collect the information it would have needed to publish definitive findings about alleged noncitizen voting.

“The 2020 Census did not collect citizenship status, and the Census Bureau does not have a comprehensive individual ‘citizenship records’ file to definitively match against voter rolls,” Noureldin wrote. The type of data the Bureau did use in its report, according to its own methodology, “are modeled population estimates, not evidence that 24,000 people voted illegally,” he continued. 

The report doesn’t list any authors or even a bureau department from which the report came. According to Mike Schneider, an Associated Press reporter who covers the Census Bureau, that’s atypical.

“Every other report on the bureau’s ‘Census Publications’ site is credited to a statistician, economist, demographer or researcher,” Schneider wrote on his Substack.

Not even a department within the bureau is listed on the completely anonymous report. The report says its data was analyzed and published with “high confidence,” but lacks any definition on what high confidence means.

Tuesday’s report references legislation from 1902 which made the Census Bureau into a permanent governmental entity and empowers the Bureau to “collect statistics related to… crime, pauperism, and benevolence, including prisoners, paupers, juvenile delinquents,” and the like. The report’s authors cite this provision as giving the Bureau authority to “compile and

publish information on crime.”

This is an oversimplified interpretation of that provision, Mark Mather, the associate vice president of programs at the Population Reference Bureau, said in a data user forum. The legislation’s provision authorized the decennial Census to count “people already in institutions,” Mather wrote, not to identify “potential lawbreakers.”

“I’m concerned about the potential chilling effect of this work,” Mather continued, saying the report “sends a potentially troubling message about how administrative data shared with the Census Bureau might be used.”

Just in the last two months, the administration has:

• Thrown out long-awaited plans to update race and ethnicity data collection;
• Eliminated an umbrella of highly technical, statistical privacy methods, which will result in less published data from the bureau;
• Proposed adding a question to the 2030 Census to identify and eliminate noncitizens from the total population count, and;
• Proposed a regulation that would eliminate the collection of race and ethnicity data for the first time in census history.

The Department of Justice since 2025 has continued escalating its efforts to obtain voter roll data from states. Federal judges have dismissed 23 DOJ suits against states which have refused to turn over voter information.

Gambling on Some Light Election Denialism In Pennsylvania

Happy Thursday!

The Republican nominee in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race is engaged in a delicate balancing act as she attempts to appeal to President Trump and his base of supporters while also trying to win over undecided voters or those who elected the state’s Democratic incumbent. For a Republican in a swing state in 2026, that means finding your election denialism equilibrium. 

Now-failed Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and prolific 2020 election denier Mike Lindell lost his bid for Minnesota governor on Tuesday night to the state’s Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who received 44.7% of the vote. Predictably, however, Lindell now has some questions about the results of his primary loss, and what he claims could be “anomalies” in the results. 

Facing little opposition, Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI), an established election denier who voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in two key states, is expected to easily secure the Republican nomination for governor in Wisconsin during Tuesday’s primary election.

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

Three prominent 2020 election deniers won GOP primary elections in Arizona for secretary of state, governor and attorney general. It’s concerning news for the future of election administration in such a crucial state.

Arizona GOP state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who is a known election denier, won the Republican primary for secretary of state this week. Kolodin is a member of the right-wing Arizona Freedom Caucus and in 2023 was sanctioned by the State Bar of Arizona for his participation in the so-called “Kraken” lawsuits, challenging the results of the 2020 election. 

The fact that an election denier could be in charge of running elections in a state that has been ground zero for election conspiracy theories since 2020, is, of course, a harrowing prospect. 

Kolodin will face off against Democratic incumbent Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in November. 

Staunch MAGA ally Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) won the GOP nomination for Arizona governor this week too, and will now face off against Democratic incumbent Gov. Katie Hobbs in November. 

Biggs, who is the former chair of the Freedom Caucus, has a rich election denial history. He has consistently supported and repeated Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was subpoenaed by the House January 6 select committee in May of 2022 as part of its investigation into the events leading up to the attack and efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. 

On January 6, 2021, Biggs objected to the counting of electoral votes in Arizona, as well as five other Biden-won states that were all subject to election misinformation in the aftermath of 2020. 

“I object to counting the votes of Arizona electors because the federal courts went around the legislatively constructed mechanism for choosing Arizona’s presidential electors allowing tens of thousands of voters to unlawfully cast votes,” Biggs wrote in a 2021 press release.

Hobbs had this to say about Biggs in a post on X this week: “Andy Biggs has spent his career selling out Arizona families for billionaires, special interests, and even convicted sex offenders.The more Arizonans learn about Biggs, the more they’ll realize he’s one big problem they can’t afford.”

Lastly, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen secured the GOP nomination for attorney general this week. Earlier this month, Petersen complied with a federal grand jury subpoena — part of the administration’s ongoing investigation into non-existent fraud in the 2020 election. Petersen handed over documents to the FBI related to a 2021 scam of an election audit in Maricopa County that found no traces of election fraud.

As always, there is lots more to catch up on. Let’s dig in. 

Trump Admin Escalates Threats of Criminal Charges Against Election Administrators

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin continues to threaten state election officials with criminal persecution over non-citizen voting, in yet another attempt by the Trump administration to exert control over elections and elevate Trump’s conspiracy theories about non-citizens voting en masse for Democrats, a repeatedly debunked myth. 

Earlier this month, the DOJ sent election officials in all 50 states letters threatening criminal prosecution if non-citizens are found on voter rolls.

On Friday, during a press conference, Mullin doubled down on these threats, demanding that states run their voter rolls through a federal database — or risk losing federal election-related funding and/or face possible criminal persecution. 

“We’re saying that the machines had to be secure, and that your voter registration list needs to be scrubbed,” Mullin said on Friday. 

“We need to make sure that individuals that are legally able to vote are voting,” he continued. “If you’re illegal and attempted to vote, or you tried to vote illegally for someone else, we will find you and we will charge you.”

Mullin is insisting that states participate in the Federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, a database typically used for verifying the citizenship and immigration status of individuals applying for certain governmental benefits. It’s been co-opted by the Trump administration to purge alleged non-citizens from voter rolls. There is evidence, however, that this tool has been incorrectly flagging eligible citizens to be booted from the voter rolls. 

“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mullin said.

This comes as the use of the database for the Trump administration’s aims has been challenged in court. The use of the SAVE system to purge voters from the rolls was blocked by a federal judge last month.

A Remarkable 16 Losses for the DOJ’s Campaign to Seize State Voter Data 

The DOJ has officially earned its 16th loss (with an impressive zero wins) in the administration’s ongoing and failing campaign to seize sensitive voter roll data from the states. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Kari Dooley, a Trump-appointee, dismissed the DOJ’s case against Connecticut, ruling that the state’s voter data is not something the federal government is entitled to. 

For many long (and embarrassing) months, the DOJ has been desperately trying to force at least 44 states and Washington, D.C. to give the department access to unredacted voter roll data, which includes private information like Social Security numbers and drivers license numbers, to the federal government.

The DOJ has been relying on provisions in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) to argue that the federal government is entitled to this type of personal identifying information. 

So far, not a single judge has agreed. 

“…the Court concludes that the Connecticut SVRL is not a record that falls within the scope of Title III, and is therefore not subject to the preservation and production requirements contemplated therein,” Dooley wrote in her order on Friday.

“This lawsuit was an illegal attempt to disenfranchise Connecticut voters and today, the court shut it down,” Connecticut’s Democratic Attorney General William Tong said in a statement on Friday. “The Constitution is clear: the President does not control our elections and has no right to manipulate Connecticut voter rolls. Connecticut follows federal law and takes its obligations under federal law very seriously. We will not be bullied into handing over sensitive voter information just because Trump demands it.”

In Other Election News

New York Times: How the G.O.P. Turned Olive Garden Into a Voter ID Talking Point

ABC News: State officials preparing if the federal government tries interfering with how they run elections

Democracy Docket: Georgia Secretary of State’s office responds to Trump DOJ threats, defends voting policies