They’re Building The Excuse Now

On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a Department of Commerce “report” that claims more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election. That sounds bad, right? At least, until you hear the response.

Lauren Groh-Wargo, the president and CEO of Fair Fight, put it like this: “This is a bald-faced lie.”

Marc Elias called the report “dodgy,” and his Democracy Docket explained that “the analysis the president cites relies on an incomplete commercial voter file and record-matching methods that raise serious concerns about the accuracy of its conclusions.”

NPR reported that the supposed “Census Bureau report” wasn’t actually produced by Census Bureau staff and “has ties to a Trump-aligned think tank.” The full report, which is seven pages long, is presented as an official document here. But NPR says “the team behind it included individuals affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank started by officials from Trump's first administration.” It’s not just the Justice Department that has been politicized to serve Trump’s political purposes.

Trump can’t stop claiming the 2020 election was rigged, no matter how many judges, including many he appointed, say it’s not so. Still more damaging is the way he may use this to justify imposing measures that make it more difficult for eligible Americans to vote in the name of preventing fraud.

To people like me who’ve spent decades working on voting rights in the Deep South, this is a familiar approach. In order to justify restrictive measures, state and local officials would claim there was voter fraud—dead people voting, people voting more than once. It wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter; it was used to justify all manner of restrictive measures that made it more difficult to vote, disallowing practices like early voting or mail-in voting.

Trump has a history of blowing up the narratives around voter fraud into previously unseen proportions, falsely claiming it’s responsible for his 2020 loss, and looking ahead to set it up as an excuse when his party does poorly in the midterms. When it comes to these new allegations, even the right-wing media ecosystem hasn’t been pushing them hard, because of the obvious flaws. But we know how Trump works. It’s a tailor-made excuse for his 2020 loss and a justification for urging states to adopt more restrictive measures now. Trump posted about the report on Tuesday, claiming: “The Census Bureau has begun checking the Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records. On the first 128,000,000 Voters, the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!” Then, to keep it simple, he posted some little graphics, including this one, which make claims that aren’t backed by fact.

Secretary Lutnick has been in the press in connection with Jeffrey Epstein of late, including a trip up to Capitol Hill to testify and revelations that he visited Epstein Island with his wife, children, and nannies in tow despite claiming he had cut off all ties with Epstein years earlier out of disgust with him. Now he’s currying favor with Trump on one of the issues that is the most important to the president, backing his claim that he won in 2020. But this isn’t Lutnick’s first outing assisting the president with his efforts to federalize our elections.

When Trump issued his March 2026 executive order to restrict mail voting, Lutnick got a major role. The order directed the Secretary of Commerce to coordinate with DHS, the SSA Commissioner, and the Postmaster General to implement it—Lutnick was Trump’s point person. Lutnick was the one to brief Trump on the contents of the executive order before Trump signed it. (If you thought Trump devised it on his own, no dice.) That order is, of course, on hold, after a federal judge ruled it was illegal.

So it’s no surprise Lutnick has found a new way to push Trump’s goals, even if that meant bringing in ringers from a pro-Trump think tank to author a report that supposedly came from the Census Bureau. Experts note that the Census Bureau does not even collect the information necessary to be able to publish definitive findings about alleged noncitizen voting. The data used in its report are modeled population estimates.

But none of that will keep Trump from using it, so it’s important for us to be prepared. 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.”

The report is just another indication we are living with a desperate administration trying to convince Americans not to trust their own elections. Their goal: create cover for rejecting 2026 election results if they don’t suit Trump. What they’re doing here fits a pattern we’ve become used to, where the administration makes claims about elections that aren’t true, that don’t withstand scrutiny by the courts. But they make them nonetheless and it’s done as though they are gospel. But they aren’t. With Trump, they never are. It’s our job to be prepared to push back against the excuses they’re preparing for the 2026 election, the challenges they’re trying to set up now, because they know they’re going to lose if it’s a fair fight.

We’re in this together,

Joyce