After several years’ worth of efforts, Donald Trump claimed two weeks ago that he had uncovered actual evidence of a problem with the 2020 election, thanks to an official analysis from a reliable source.
“The Census Bureau has begun checking the Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records,” the president wrote to his social media platform. “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!”
He did not win the election, and the Census Bureau document the Republican was so excited about did not deserve to be taken seriously. In fact, The Associated Press reported that the claim that the president made about the bureau’s findings was “false.”
“The report says it checked data from a commercial voter file against federal records to identify noncitizens who allegedly voted in the election,” the AP explained. “According to experts, the methodology described in the report may have created false positives if, for example, an individual’s name was linked to the wrong address or their citizenship status hadn’t been updated in a certain database. Details about error rates and how the report ensured accurate results were not included.”
This was notable in its own right, though NPR reported on a related development that unfolded the day after the Census Bureau’s dubious analysis reached the public. From the NPR report:
The reliability of Census Bureau information during the Trump administration is coming under question again.
[In August], the bureau’s parent agency, the Commerce Department, quietly cut language banning political interference from the department’s scientific integrity policy, NPR has learned.
According to NPR’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, the Commerce Department updated its policy for promoting a “culture of scientific integrity” ahead of Trump’s second inaugural. That version included bans on attempts to shape or interfere in data collection, statistical analysis and other scientific activities “against well-accepted scientific methods and theories or without scientific justification.”
The department’s policy, the document added, involves ensuring scientific findings at its agencies “are not suppressed, delayed, or altered for political purposes and are not subjected to inappropriate influence,” as well as making sure there’s “independent review of facilities, methodologies, and other scientific activities as appropriate to ensure scientific integrity.”
Under the Trump administration’s revised version of the policy, elements of this are now missing, including the deletion of the phrase about “protection from inappropriate influence” as one of the “hallmarks of scientific integrity.”
To be sure, this doesn’t apply exclusively to the Census Bureau — the Commerce Department, led by Secretary Howard Lutnick, also includes agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Economic Analysis — but NPR’s report quoted Nancy Potok, a former deputy director and former chief operating officer at the Census Bureau, who described the removed language as “a major change that eliminates the guardrails against political interference in the statistical and scientific data products of the department.”
(Spokespeople for the Commerce Department and Census Bureau did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.)
It’s worth re-emphasizing the simple fact that the Census Bureau is supposed to be an apolitical agency that can be counted on to produce accurate, reliable and objective data for the public. In this case, that clearly did not happen.
Unlike every other research report prepared by the Census Bureau, however, the one Trump was excited about was unsigned and clearly the result of sloppy methodology. The document was so outrageous that Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan, explained in a detailed analysis, “Let me be clear: This report is propaganda. … For the first time ever, the Census Bureau has produced low-rent partisan nonsense.”
“That means the government has turned an essential, truth-telling institution into a machine for producing and disguising political claims,” Wolfers added. “When that happens, the country loses more than a single honest number. It loses its grip on reality. … Mature industrial democracies don’t make official statistics in party backrooms. They don’t hide authors or conceal error rates. They don’t take a computer’s first guess and present it as a criminal verdict. And they don’t hear the smoke alarm and start filing insurance claims. They check for the fire. They publish methods. They publish limitations. They let critics test the work. And if the work is wrong, they correct it. That’s how a country keeps track of the truth.”
Americans need to be able to rely on entities such as the Census Bureau to dispute propaganda, not promote propaganda. The more it’s corrupted by a president hell-bent on proving he secretly won an election he lost, the more we all suffer.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Team Trump reportedly changes the Census Bureau’s standards on political interference appeared first on MS NOW.
