"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute." -- George Orwell, 1984
Americans are increasingly skeptical of government data -- with good reason.
Unfortunately, Trump’s attacks on the integrity of official statistics have continued. Last month, the US Census Bureau published an official brief that claims to have “readily determined with high confidence” that, of the 160 million voters in the 2020 presidential election, more than 128 million were citizens and more than 24,000 were noncitizens. “Over 32 million voter records remain to be analyzed.”
This report clearly falls short of the Census Bureau’s own standards of quality, integrity, and accountability. For example, it does not name its authors or provide relevant contact information for members of the public interested in asking questions about the report. Examining these unusual omissions, NPR reports that “the analysis was not conducted by career civil servants at the Census Bureau,” but by individuals affiliated with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute.
Then there is the fact that the brief’s subject matter is nakedly political. Illegal voting is a topic that the bureau previously would have bent over backward to avoid, lest it be accused of engaging in partisan politics. Not any longer. On the day the report appeared, Trump himself posted about it on social media, highlighting the 24,000 illegal vote figure and claiming that “The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!”
The report’s analysis links a variety of databases together in an effort to determine if all the people who voted in the 2020 election were citizens. One is a private-sector database of voter registration and turnout records, which was used here to figure out who voted in the election. The authors then linked this database to internal government databases with the goal of determining the citizenship status of the individuals in the private-sector data on voter records.
This type of analysis is challenging for several reasons. Large private-sector databases of the type used by the brief’s authors often contain missing values for key variables (including home address, birth date, and name) that one would use to ensure that the same individual is being observed across multiple data sources. Normally, a study relying on this sort of data linking would provide extensive, detailed, and assessable information about the challenges the researchers faced and how they overcame them. That is how one convinces professional statisticians, economists, and demographers that one’s conclusions are credible. (Indeed, the bureau has reporting requirements to this effect, which the authors of this brief seem to have violated.)