Trump has touted a recent Census report. WIRED found grave flaws in its analysis and the process behind it, and confirmed the identity of several of its authors - among them a one-time DOGE affiliate.
However, though Trump and other government officials quickly shared and praised the report, a WIRED investigation has uncovered significant flaws in the data used to compile the report, as well as in the approval process used prior to publication. WIRED has also learned that a number of the report's authors have links to the Trump administration and the Republican party. They include one former affiliate of Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency and two researchers from the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a highly influential think tank founded by veterans of Trump's first administration.
The report, titled "Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election: A Beginning Analysis," claims that an analysis of over 128 million voter records from the 2020 election identified 24,000 people tied to administrative records indicating noncitizen status. The numbers range from 4,300 in California to fewer than 15 in Wyoming - not nearly enough to have affected the outcome of the presidential race. But even these figures seem extremely questionable, and experts and Census Bureau employees who spoke to WIRED allege it is much likelier that they represent basic analytical errors than actual instances of noncitizen voting.
The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. The White House directed WIRED to President Donald Trump's post on Truth Social and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's post on X , where both officials praised the report.
The number of noncitizens voting in US elections has been repeatedly shown to be vanishingly small. In Utah, for example, the state's top election official, Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, reviewed the state's approximately 2.1 million registered voters. The result was the discovery of 27 "confirmed noncitizens," none of whom was ever confirmed to have voted. Studies in Pennsylvania and Idaho have returned similar outcomes. Still, the idea that a flood of noncitizens have been voting in US elections for over a decade, skewing the outcomes, has remained one of the central conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and his allies.
John Abowd, former associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist at the Census Bureau, called the Census report "statistical nonsense" and wrote on LinkedIn that "it is extremely uncommon for the US Census Bureau to publish a research report, even one of blog length, without the authors explicitly listed."
Census Bureau sources who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity could not say what prompted the report. Records reviewed by WIRED, though, show it originated at the Center for Economic Studies , a division within the Census Bureau that uses confidential data to conduct research.
According to those records, one of the authors was Dan Sweeney, currently a deputy general counsel at the Department of Commerce overseeing the Census Bureau. He previously worked as the "DOGE legal liaison and deregulatory attorney" at the Environmental Protection Agency, according to his LinkedIn profile . Michael Lachanski was also an author, according to two sources with knowledge of the report's origins, and he was appointed to his current role as the deputy director for data, policy, and science at the Census Bureau just two months ago. Previously, he was a fellow at the Trump-aligned Claremont Institute .
The two America First staffers involved in authoring the report, according to records reviewed by WIRED, were Matthew Jensen and Jeff McCrea . McCrea previously served as campaign manager for former congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who has expressed a belief in creationism and signed an amicus brief contesting the 2020 election results. Jensen previously worked for the American Enterprise Institute, where, according to his bio on the America First Policy Institute website , "contributed to the design of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act," the tax law passed during the first Trump administration.
Sweeney, Lachanski, Jensen, and McCrea did not respond to requests for comment.
Sources who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity confirmed that Jensen and McCrea are working in government on loan from America First through what is known as the Intergovernment Personnel Act . The IPA is meant to allow people with specialized skill sets from certain institutions, like nonprofits and universities, to work for the government for up to two years on a temporary appointment.
Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, says that the Bureau has long used IPAs for scientific work. "But they do what the civil servants require them to do, not what the political [appointees] require them to do."
Boyd says that the group of people who records indicate authored the noncitizen voting report appear to be of a different stripe. "These ultimately appear to be people coming from a Republican operation that's pretending to be a 501c3," she says. "Rather than doing the work for the agency, it appears they're doing work in political interest." The AFPI did not respond to a request for comment.
The report was approved by the Census Bureau's disclosure review board on August 7 through an email vote, which is typically used for publications with tight deadlines or in response to demands from Congress or the White House. The members of the review board who approved the report were shown the three tables contained in the final publication, but not the analysis that accompanied them , according to one source within the bureau who had access to the materials submitted to the review board.
The report concludes that the author's analysis "readily determined with high confidence that over 128 million of these voter records represented citizens, and that over 24,000 of these voter records represented noncitizens at the time of the election. Over 32 million voter records remain to be analyzed."
According to documents viewed by WIRED, the authors used data from the DataClear 2020 voting file - a commercial dataset - as well as USCIS immigration records (both the 2025 extract and the February 2026 A-number and case files); USCIS DACA approvals from 2025; State Department immigrant and nonimmigrant visas for 2017 through 2023; ICE student, removal, and national-docket records; IRS form 1040 for 2020; Social Security Numident (2019 and 2020); and State Department passport issuances across 50 vintages from 1978 through 2025.
Reporting synthesized and verified under Nexvoro.tech editorial guidelines. Full primary records referenced via Wired.
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