Earlier this month, White House trade advisor Peter Navarro appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast and boasted that the public could expect fresh and compelling evidence related to the 2020 election in the coming days. It was a curious declaration, in large part because Donald Trump, just weeks earlier, had an opportunity to present evidence during a prime-time address, and the president failed spectacularly.

Still, Navarro’s comments suggested that election deniers and other conspiracy theorists had something to look forward to. Eight days after the interview, Trump published this item to his social media platform, which read in part:

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! … Thank you for your attention to this matter!

As is true about every other conspiratorial claim Trump has made about his 2020 defeat, everything about his online statement was wrong. As The Washington Post reported soon after, “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.  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.”

But that’s just the start — because there’s no reason to take Trump’s figure of 24,000 illegal votes at face value. The Associated Press also reported that the specific claim that the president made about the Census Bureau’s findings was also “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.”

At this point, I suspect a lot of readers are thinking, “So, Trump peddled yet another false claim about his 2020 election defeat, as he has done countless times before. Fact-checks have value, but isn’t this well-tread ground?”

The answer is yes, of course, but there’s a reason to see this latest incident as especially pernicious, more so than the president’s usual conspiratorial nonsense about his loss to Joe Biden six years ago.

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, this one 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.

The post Why Trump’s latest failed effort to bolster his 2020 conspiracy theory was so dangerous appeared first on MS NOW.

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