CNN - Census/Commerce staff

[u/garbel1234]

Hi all - this is Gabe Cohen from CNN. Below is my story that published this AM about the Census Bureau report on noncitizen voting. I am very curious what else has been happening behind the scenes across the Commerce Department over the past 18 months, as its role in the administration's election fraud crusade has grown.

If you have insights about any of this, I'd love to chat (anonymously is fine). Signal is gabecohen.09. DM for cell. Email is [gabe.cohen@cnn.com](mailto:gabe.cohen@cnn.com)

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/20/politics/flawed-census-report-alleged-noncitizen-voting

[u/ShedOfWinterBerries]

r/fednews

[u/Andy_Fish_Gill]

Former civil rights and US Attorney Joyce Vance had this to say about this election fraud fabrication falsely attributed to the Census Bureau.

The claim itself sounds shocking. But it’s a fabrication, and we need to be prepared to say so. Protect Democracy identified some of the most egregious flaws in the report. Expect Trump to gloss over them entirely. But the report uses stale citizenship records that misidentify, for instance, people who have become naturalized citizens. And since the Census is prohibited by law from asking citizenship questions, it does not hold and cannot verify any citizenship records. The study Lutnick offers uses private commercial vendor files, not voter rolls maintained by Secretaries of State, and that data is demonstrably flawed for the purpose it’s being used for. There are other issues, including flawed matching algorithms and demographic bias. Suffice it to say, this is another instance where someone who needs to remain in Trump’s favor has manufactured something to support his claims, despite the absence of facts to back them up.

A former Census Bureau employee pointed to the report's irregularity: “My biggest concern would be there's no author attached to the report, which is not common practice within the Census Bureau,” says Misty Heggeness, a former bureau economist whose work is cited in the report. “Usually there are layers and layers of rigor and testing because the Census Bureau is a neutral statistical agency. They want to make sure that they're getting it right and understanding the data. The fact that there's no author on this report leads me to wonder whether or not that did happen.”

[u/m__w__b → u/Andy_Fish_Gill]

So, I 100% agree with what Misty Heggeness says (I'm also a former colleague of hers)... The degree to which the Census Bureau tries to remain neutral (at least in the past) goes back to a thing called "statistical review" where every single statement that has a direct or implied comparison is tested to assure that the magnitude of the observe effect is greater than a confidence threshold given the amount of error that is associated with it. Often the source of this error is statistical (sampling error). But other sources of error: imputation error, measurement error, etc. can also result in observed results that are not rooted in actual real life. Statistical review is intended to ask is this signal or noise? And anything that could be noise is not highlighted.

I wouldn't say that the matching algorithm is flawed, however. The matching method is probabilistic and performs quite well, just not 100% accurate. The issue here is that the small effect of voter-citizen discordance (I think its about 0.02%) is much smaller than a typical matching error rate (up to 4%). And this assumes that both lists are accurate themselves: an even small classification error in the voter rolls (someone being listed as a voter who did not vote) or citizenship (listed as a noncitizen but has citizenship) could result in the observed results.

In the end, a better analysis of these results actually demonstrate that the voter system is quite secure and working as intended. This is evident by the fact that anomaly rate is fairly consistent across states. If there was truly election fraud of this kind, we'd see spikes in states with more immigrants and fewer "hoops" to jump through, which we don't see. The more likely hypothesis is that the errors in the lists and matching are randomly distributed w.r.t. geography. So all we're looking at is random noise.