Every week, it feels like President Donald Trump’s administration is making a new piece of news about elections. It is investigating past elections in at least four states. It is exploring what feels like every possible avenue to get ahold of voter data in individual states and counties. It is attempting to create new administrative hurdles to mail voting and prioritizing major voting legislation over all else. |
But it all ties back to one thing: the repeated assertions from the president and his allies that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers. |
No evidence has emerged to support that. Election officials and experts have repeatedly said those assertions are false and such cases are rare. But they appear to be the animating force behind everything the administration is doing. |
Scattered reports that investigators for the Department of Homeland Security are requesting detailed data on individual registered voters confirm the administration’s ongoing focus on finding and prosecuting any such cases. |
Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department was pressing prosecutors to focus on 90 open investigations into potential noncitizens voting as a top priority. Federal prosecutors have already brought some cases against individuals that officials are touting, including one in Louisiana last week. |
But despite the administration’s zeal, it isn’t clear how many such cases there are to bring. States have run more than 60 million records of registered voters through a revamped federal immigration database that the administration has encouraged state election officials to use to validate the citizenship of registered voters, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That’s around a third of the voters registered in the U.S., according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. |
Out of those, the department told Votebeat, the system has flagged around 24,000 as potential noncitizens — about 0.04%. All those cases “have been referred to ICE's Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation,” the department said in a statement. |
As Votebeat reported in April, the Department of Homeland Security is sending subpoenas to local elections officials in Texas, searching for detailed information about individual voters. Investigators have also contacted at least one county in North Carolina, a development reported last week by Axios. |
The Department of Homeland Security said it is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” and declined to comment on specific cases. |
Twenty-four thousand potential cases sounds like a lot, but election officials have already found that at least some of those potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens. |
It also isn’t clear how many of those people have actually voted. Experts across the political spectrum agree that noncitizens who don’t understand the laws may accidentally register to vote, so that in and of itself is not necessarily a sign of intentional fraud. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to questions about how many cases of noncitizen voting the agency has documented, or how many registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens. |
But administration officials and those who support the investigations have been quick to dismiss questions about whether the small number of cases means noncitizen voting isn’t a big issue. |
Last weekend, CNN anchor Kasie Hunt asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about data from the conservative Heritage Foundation that showed only 25 cases of people being prosecuted for voter fraud where citizenship was an issue. |
“Well, 25 is too many,” said Mullin. “It’s kind of like one illegal death, one individual that dies from the hands of an illegal is one too many. It’s all preventable. One person voting illegally is one too many. We shouldn’t have to worry about even one.” |
Justin Riemer, president of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a conservative nonprofit focused on voting issues, agreed with Mullin’s perspective. |
“Why is it such a bad thing that they are enforcing federal law?” Riemer said. “To me, any election crime is serious and needs to be prosecuted. I don’t think it’s a good system that this happens, regardless of how often it happens.” |
Ken Cuccinelli, who during the first Trump administration was acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said outside investigations are no substitute for federal investigations that have much more authority to examine potential fraud. |
"It may be that they bring nothing of it and that will tell us more than anything else, but I suspect that's unlikely," he said. |
Ultimately, Cuccinelli said, "this is as much about confidence in who is participating in the voter rolls and whether our states themselves are helping, hiding, or hurting the security and transparency of our elections system." |
Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the White House on democracy and voting rights issues under Joe Biden, characterized the Trump administration’s search as an unproductive hunt for a “boogeyman” to cast doubt on American elections. |
“The notion that noncitizens are voting in elections in sufficient quantities to swing those elections, particularly in statewide contests, is a fiction,” he said. |
Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor and author of a book on voter fraud, suggested that the Trump administration investigations were an effort to create “maximum chaos and intimidation” across the country. |
“The picture of the federal government sending Homeland Security to investigate is such overkill that you have to believe that they are trying to create a spectacle to intimidate people and go on a fishing expedition using bad data,” she said. |
Votebeat Brunch: What does an FBI investigation in Ohio mean for the upcoming election? |
Last week, the FBI carried out a search of an Ohio voting rights group as part of an apparent investigation of its voter registration work. This week, we talk with Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, about the implications for her state and beyond. |
What impact do you think the FBI investigation in Ohio could have? |
It could have a chilling effect where folks may be afraid to conduct voter registration drives or volunteer for voter advocacy organizations, and that would be absolutely tragic, because third-party nonpartisan organizations play such a pivotal role in making sure that Ohioans are registered and participate in elections. It is not easy to get registered and stay registered to vote in Ohio. We really need nonpartisan organizations to go to festivals and concerts and community events and farmers markets to get folks registered so they can participate in elections. |
How should people respond to the FBI investigations? |
I understand that there are many reasons for voters, advocates, and even elections officials to feel intimidated in this moment, but what's most important is that we all continue to participate in our democracy. At the local level, our elections are run by bipartisan teams of elections officials who deeply care about every voter, and I trust their ability to administer elections. It's the job of organizations like mine to make sure that they have the resources and support to do that, and so to the extent that that means that we need to litigate and advocate, we're going to do that, but I trust our elections officials to run strong elections. Keep in mind that the federal government has no place in overseeing local elections. |
Does it raise alarm bells? |
I think it’s really fair to be concerned. If our votes didn’t have any power, it wouldn’t have taken so long for women and people of color, Native Americans, people with disabilities, military serving overseas, and 18-year-olds to get the right to vote. Right now what we do see are a lot of attempts to make voting harder, but what I do know is every Ohioan, and I bet every American, wants a robust democracy where we are all heard, and we can protect that by participating in the system. We can protect democracy by participating in it as voters, as poll workers, as advocates, and by checking in with our loved ones to make sure that they are registered and have a plan to vote. |
What else can people do? |
I think that we can strengthen and protect elections together by making sure that elections officials have the funding they need to administer elections, by pushing back on disinformation, by becoming poll workers and making sure that every eligible voter is registered and votes. All of us are called to counter false information to build stronger relationships with our communities and to work together to make sure that everyone has the information they need to vote. |
How do you respond to the declining lack of public trust in the U.S. electoral process? |
Anyone who doesn’t trust elections should become a poll worker, because then you get to see how democracy works up front. We have safety and security protocols baked into every aspect of elections. I liken it to safety in cars. We don’t just have seat belts; we also have antilock brakes and air bags and new systems that tell us when we’re getting too close to a car. That’s the same with elections. Security is baked in, from administering to counting the votes to auditing the results to securing the equipment to checking in every voter. I am very, very confident in our democratic processes and our elections across the country, but those that are concerned can easily feel better if they become a poll worker. |
