You can breath a sigh of relief because the government says the government didn’t influence the 2012 presidential election by fudging the unemployment numbers leading up to Election Day. Recall that the headline unemployment rate miraculously fell from 8.1% to 7.8% just weeks away from the election, and a Philadelphia Census employee claimed in November 2013 that he was told to falsify data. But a new inspector general’s report exonerates Census employees, saying any coordinated effort “likely would have been detected by the Census Bureau’s quality assurance procedures.” The report did warn, however, that some Census policies leave the door open for fakery. One might also have thought the systematic failure that made IRS targeting possible would have been prevented by protocol, so forgive us if we remain skeptical.