A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
All right. Let's talk to David Becker. He's the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. It's a nonprofit that works with Republicans and Democrats on building trust in elections across the U.S. David, so you just heard NPR's Miles Parks reporting on the president's claim that China got ahold of voter data. And let's hear some of what the president said last night.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.
MARTÍNEZ: David, did that happen?
DAVID BECKER: Well, I think we've long suspected that China was trying to accumulate as much data on Americans as possible. The intelligence community regularly confirms that. But this is probably the least concerning element of that Chinese operation. Voter lists in the United States are all public. Every state has a public version of their voter list. Some states literally put it on the web. You can just Google it, and states like Ohio and North Carolina. So it's not surprising at all that China would collect this data, and maybe that other foreign countries have collected this data as well.
But this is just static data that you would collect. And it doesn't mean you can do anything to the actual vote. White House spokespeople came out last night and said, with this data, you could change registration records, you could vote on behalf of someone. You absolutely could not. This data would not be sufficient for that. And even if it occurred, we would know it happened because we'd get widespread reports of people having problems voting. And we didn't see anything like that.
MARTÍNEZ: Did you find any evidence of election fraud in the declassified documents that the Trump administration released?
BECKER: No. I mean, I reviewed those documents. I've been working on this for quite some time. And if anything, yesterday's release of documents confirmed that the 2020 election was not stolen. This administration has been in total control of federal government for 18 months. They have used every tool within the federal government, the intelligence community, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI to try to find evidence of massive 2020 election fraud.
And in those 18 months, they've produced nothing. And last night, we heard White House spokespeople confirm that they have no evidence of any vote flipping, any changes in the votes, anything that would've changed the outcome of the 2020 election. What we heard last night actually confirms what we've known for nearly six years now after the paper ballots that we've used in all the states were audited, and that's the 2020 election was successfully run. The outcome represented the will of the people.
MARTÍNEZ: OK. Now, President Trump also talked about noncitizens being registered to vote, something he called, quote, "shocking." He didn't say, though, that they actually cast ballots, but that they were registered. Can you help us with some context on that?
BECKER: Sure. My nonprofit actually looks at a lot of this research. We just published an update on that research this week. And what we know is that occasionally, almost always through administrative error, there are some ineligible individuals who get on the voter list. But that number is very small. And the number who actually vote is minuscule. And we know this not because I'm telling you that or because, you know, some advocates are saying that.
The Trump administration itself has confirmed that. In the same report, in the documents that they released last night, the Trump administration confirmed they looked at 68 million voter records with highly specific personal information that was voluntarily shared by a certain group of states, enabling them to accurately match it to incomplete citizenship records that the Department of Homeland Security has. And in that 68 million, they found only 28,000 possible noncitizens. That is a rate of noncitizen registration around 0.04%. That's consistent with what we've seen regularly. We also know when the lists of those potential noncitizens is reported to the states and they investigate, those numbers decline sharply because the Department of Homeland Security doesn't have complete citizenship data that it can match.
So there are a few. The states are doing a very good job of flagging them. It's almost always by accident. Someone here who's in this country who's not a citizen would not choose to get registered because that will lead to deportation, a point that White House spokespeople made very clearly last night. So it's not likely that someone would choose to do this just for the big payoff of casting a single ballot in an election in which maybe 150 million ballots are cast.
MARTÍNEZ: That's David Becker, founder and executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. David, thanks.
BECKER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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