There is no evidence that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani received more than 220,000 suspicious votes in last year’s election, as suggested by posts citing an audit report that used a flawed methodology according to the city’s elections board and an election data expert.
Mamdani received more than 50% of votes in the November 4, 2025, mayoral election on a turnout of more than 2 million voters.
After former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani cited the audit on a talk show days later, posts shared that show’s clip widely, amplifying claims that fraudulent votes stemmed from non-existent voters, voters from outside NYC and voters without social security numbers or invalid ones.
The group’s analysis investigated 10,000 registered voters, who it said were randomly selected from a specific subset of voters registered between 2021 and 2025, and then extrapolated from the data to speculate that as many as one quarter of New York City voter registrations were suspicious.
Real America Vote did not respond to a request for comment.
Critics of the report pointed to flaws in the statistical methods and assumptions, and in the use of a commercial database whose accuracy was not verified.
FLAWS IN THE AUDIT
Charles Stewart III, a political science professor and director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, said in an email that the audit described its sample frame as anyone who registered from 2021 to 2025.
“New registrants tend to be younger, more likely to be minorities and more residentially mobile,” he said. “These are all populations that are known to be significantly underrepresented in commercial databases, such as credit bureau lists.”
This is relevant because the two largest categories of concern in the audit are “does not exist” and “not in NYC,” Stewart said.
The report also flagged social security numbers starting with numbers in the 700 and 800 ranges, which it assumed would go to those born after 2011, who are not old enough to vote. However, those numbers could also go to adults, Stewart said.
“Naturalized citizens are a likely population group, but there could be others, such as those who received replacement numbers,” he said.
Stewart also flagged a misleading reliance on the margin of error claimed by the report, which estimates that 2,480 people, or a quarter of the sample it examined, were unqualified voters and extrapolated that to nearly one million voters to derive its conclusion that more than 200,000 votes were suspicious.
Whatever the margin of error, Stewart said, it only covers random sampling error and says nothing about whether the commercial database correctly classified the voters.
‘INACCURATE ASSUMPTIONS’
The NYC Board of Elections (BOE) said in an emailed statement that the report’s “flawed methodology and inaccurate assumptions about our data do not make for sound public policy, nor do they produce a credible report.”
If the organization provides specific names, addresses and supporting evidence, BOE added, the board will review every submission. “Should we uncover evidence of criminal activity or election fraud, we will refer those matters to the appropriate law enforcement agencies, as we have done on multiple occasions in the past,” it said.
The U.S. Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment. The New York City Mayor’s Office said it does not oversee municipal elections and referred Reuters to the BOE.
VERDICT
Misleading. There is no evidence that more than 200,000 fraudulent votes were cast in the New York City mayoral election in 2025. The figure stems from a flawed audit of a small sample of registered-voter names in a commercial database.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work.
