The president pointed to data that he said shows 24,000 illegal votes cast in 2020, a tiny fraction of the total vote that year.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday re-upped his long-standing false claims of a rigged 2020 election, seizing on what he described as 24,000 illegal votes uncovered in a review of voter and citizenship records to again assert that he won the election.
In the post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump claimed that the U.S. Census Bureau has begun checking voter records against citizenship records, and that of the first 128 million voters, “the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally!” He added that when the bureau examined the next tranche of 32 million votes, the number of fraudulent votes would “explode.”
Even taking Trump’s figure of 24,000 illegal votes at face value — a purported illegal voting share of less than two-hundredths of a percent — it would not establish that he won the 2020 election. Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes, with his narrowest decisive margins including 10,457 votes in Arizona, 11,779 in Georgia and 20,682 in Wisconsin.
To successfully dispute the result, Trump would need to show not simply that illegal votes were cast somewhere in the country, but that enough of the invalid ballots were cast for Biden in the specific states needed to change the electoral college outcome.
Trump’s post offered no evidence about where the purported 24,000 voters cast ballots or which candidate they supported.
Nonetheless, Trump treated the review as a vindication. “I WON THE ELECTION!” he wrote on Truth Social.
The Census Bureau and the White House did not immediately respond to questions Tuesday, and it was not clear what sort of review of voter data had been conducted or by whom. Trump posted images from the Census Bureau that suggested it conducted a review by examining instances of voters who lacked U.S. birth certificates, passports or other proof of citizenship and had been issued a green card or other documentation indicating they were a noncitizen. Federal databases can include inaccurate and outdated information about some people’s citizenship status.
The post — like Trump’s long-standing false claims that the 2020 election was rigged — has served to rally his political base and bolster his push for the Save America Act, legislation that, among other provisions, would require voters to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. Critics warn the bill, which is stalled in the Senate, could disenfranchise large numbers of eligible voters.
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The post also continued Trump’s long-standing fixation on noncitizen voting and false claims that noncitizens routinely vote in large numbers.
Noncitizens are barred from voting in federal elections, and they rarely do so, according to independent reviews and court findings. Georgia in 2024 found 20 noncitizens on its voter rolls — which amounts to about 0.002 percent of its registered voters. After an exhaustive review, a federal judge in 2018 determined that, at most, 39 noncitizens were placed on the voter rolls in Kansas over 19 years — in many cases because of administrative errors.
Around the country, a handful of noncitizens are charged with illegally voting from time to time. Most recently, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general announced charges against five noncitizens. But the Justice Department under Trump has struggled to find cases to prosecute.
Wider-scale examples of noncitizen voting sometimes emerge, as they did recently in New Jersey. State officials disclosed they had inadvertently registered several thousand noncitizens to vote because of a software error. About 400 of those noncitizens went on to cast ballots, they said.
In a speech from the White House last month, Trump alleged that a review by the Department of Homeland Security found that more than 250,000 noncitizens were on the voter rolls in four states. State officials called the figure preposterous, and DHS has not provided the states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — with more details.
It is unclear how the department conducted its review of voter rolls, because those states — like many others — have declined to give the federal government access to the full version of their voter lists that include driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. Not having the full list greatly increases the chance of data mismatches.
The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to try to get their voter rolls, but the cases have gone badly for the department. So far, it has lost 23 cases and not had any wins.
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