The effects of kinematic cuts on electric charge fluctuations in a gas of charged particles are discussed. We consider a very transparent example of an ideal pion gas with quantum statistics, which can be viewed as a multi-component gas of Boltzmann particles with different charges and masses. Cumulants of net-electric charge fluctuations χ_n^Q are calculated in a static and expanding medium with flow parameters adjusted to the experimental data. We show that the transverse momentum cut,

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... ≤ p_t≤ p_t_max, weakens the effects of Bose statistics, i.e. contributions of effectively multi-charged states to higher order moments. Consequently, cuts in p_t modify the experimentally measured cumulants and their ratios. We discuss the influence of kinematic cuts on the ratio of mean and variance of electric charge fluctuations in a hadron resonance gas, in the light of recent data of the STAR and PHENIX Collaborations. We find that the different momentum cuts of p_t_min=0.2 GeV (STAR) and p_t_min=0.3 GeV (PHENIX) are responsible for more than 30% of the difference between these two data sets. We argue that the p_t cuts imposed on charged particles will influence the normalized kurtosis κ_Qσ_Q^2 = χ_4^Q/χ_2^Q of the electric charge fluctuations. In particular, the reduction of κ_Qσ_Q^2 with increasing p_t_min will lead to differences between PHENIX and STAR data of O(6%) which currently are buried under large statistical and systematic errors. We furthermore introduce the relation between momentum cut-off and finite volume effects, which is of relevance for the comparison between experimental data and lattice QCD calculations.