In this latest installment of The Professor Is In, I dig into your follow-up questions and address comments from my earlier episode debunking the Census Bureau’s claim that 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 election.
This is not just a story about a bogus claim. It’s a more fundamental shift as a previously independent agency is being enlisted to create propaganda for the White House. It’s an attack on one of our most important truth-generating institutions.
The claim that 24,000 voters were ineligible — alleged in an unsigned report — can be explained by a combination of people-matching errors and outdated citizenship records. The broader lesson is that when you’re trying to measure rare events, even small amounts of error can overwhelm statistical signals, often over-stating how frequently these events occur.
Nevertheless, I wanted to address the elephant in the room: even if the claim were true (which it’s not), these votes couldn’t have swung anything. Biden won the 2020 popular vote by seven million votes. As for the decisive states: he won Arizona by 10,000 votes, Georgia by 12,000, and Wisconsin by 21,000. By comparison, this report alleges 1,100, 400, and 500 fraudulent votes in those states, respectively.
In other words: the math never gets close.
I also dig into the institutional question: why the BLS guardrail held while the one at the Census did not. Was it simply because the BLS had the right senator on the right committee, and she was willing to go to bat for it? Or another factor: aside from it’s own-a-decade moment in the sun, the Census often conducts its essential work quietly in the background. As such, its reports don’t get the same headline-grabbing attention as the BLS’ monthly data drops.
Whatever the reason, the stakes here are far greater than a single report: The Census not only determines Congressional representation but underpins nearly every official number we rely on as a nation and economy. And when a statistical agency begins producing propaganda, we join a notorious club of countries that have put everything from democracy to economic prosperity on the line.
Excellent analysis, Justin!
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Yuval Noah Harari writes every information network tries to balance two things: discovering the truth and maintaining order. Harari emphasizes that order usually wins—institutions, religions, and totalitarian regimes routinely bend or fabricate information to keep people unified and obedient rather than to pursue unvarnished facts. His primary takeaway is that societies must actively build and protect institutional "self-correcting mechanisms" to prevent information from turning into a network of mass delusion. Harari warns against the concentration of data in the hands of a few tech giants, centralized government monopoly over data is more egregious.