NEW YORK – A Trump administration initiative targeting noncitizens suspected of being illegally registered to vote has identified roughly 1,600 potential voter fraud cases and resulted in 160 arrests, Matthew Millhollin, a senior Homeland Security Investigations official, said at a press briefing Tuesday.
The figures, released six weeks before Election Day, offer a rare glimpse into a campaign that has shifted federal resources and hundreds of employees toward investigating alleged election misconduct at President Donald Trump’s direction.
The total is far below the hundreds of thousands of noncitizen voters Trump and the Department of Homeland Security have previously suggested could be listed on voter rolls. It also amounts to a very small share of the more than 211 million active registered voters nationwide, reinforcing what former election officials and election law experts have long said: Voter fraud, including voting by noncitizens, is rare.
“They have tried to manufacture evidence of widespread noncitizen voting, and every time they do, their numbers are incredibly small, even when they’re overstated,” said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney who heads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “They confirm what we’ve known for years, which is that states have been doing an extraordinarily good job of keeping noncitizens off their voter lists.”
Millhollin disclosed the arrest figures during a joint briefing with the Justice Department and the U.S. Postal Service. The event focused on federal charges against a Utah postal worker accused of discarding more than 300 mail ballots during the state’s June primary. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at the same briefing that the Justice Department had charged 70 people since the administration began with “unlawful voting and registration offenses.”
Neither Millhollin nor McCotter explained precisely which offenses were included in their respective totals or whether the figures overlapped. Homeland Security Investigations, an agency within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, typically handles immigration-related crimes. A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to an emailed request for clarification.
With November’s midterm elections approaching, and control of Congress at stake for the final two years of his term, Trump has mounted an extensive effort to curb what he says is widespread noncitizen voting. Research, however, has consistently found that such voting is extremely uncommon.
Trump has signed two election-related executive orders that partly address the issue, although both are facing legal challenges. He has also pushed states to adopt a controversial federal voter database that a judge blocked over privacy concerns and repeatedly urged Congress to approve a stalled bill requiring documentary proof of citizenship.
In August, DHS took another step, directing some U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees to conduct full-time manual reviews of state voter rolls after the agency was unable to obtain detailed data from every state, according to a federal whistleblower report. The whistleblower alleged that employees were being instructed to misrepresent themselves when using state voter lookup systems, potentially violating state law. The report also warned that the operation relies on unreliable information that could mistakenly draw U.S. citizens into federal investigations.
Texas election officials reviewed voters flagged as noncitizens by Trump’s federal voter database before a judge blocked the system’s use. Of the 2,724 registered voters examined, officials referred 117 cases to the Texas attorney general’s office. By mid-September, seven people had been charged in the state with illegally voting in federal elections or falsely claiming to be U.S. citizens. Texas has approximately 18 million registered voters.
Becker said the Texas cases reflect a broader pattern seen in investigations of suspected noncitizen voting: After scrutiny, the number of confirmed cases is consistently small.
“No system is perfect,” Becker said, adding that he knew of no election whose outcome had been changed by noncitizen voting.
During Tuesday’s briefing, McCotter maintained that even a limited number of voter fraud cases can pose a serious threat.
“The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election,” McCotter said. “But the actions of even one malicious actor on the ground can fatally undercut that security.”
Kathy Boockvar, a former Democratic secretary of state in Pennsylvania who now leads a nonpartisan election security firm, said exaggerated claims about election fraud carry tangible consequences for election administrators.
“Lots of people just believe what they hear, then reach out to election officials, and these days don’t have any qualms about threatening them,” Boockvar said. “There is a direct, constant effect here that leads to the fueling of antagonism against election officials.”
