The Trump administration’s campaign to identify and prosecute suspected non-citizen voters has produced roughly 1,600 voter-fraud cases and 160 arrests, figures that experts say fall far short of claims that widespread illegal voting is corrupting US elections.
The figures were disclosed on Tuesday, September 22, during a joint briefing involving the Department of Justice, Homeland Security Investigations and the US Postal Service. The announcement came six weeks before November’s midterm elections, as federal agencies intensify scrutiny of state voter rolls.
Matthew Millhollin, a senior Homeland Security Investigations official, gave the arrest figures as prosecutors outlined charges against a Utah postal worker accused of discarding more than 300 mail-in ballots during the state’s June primary. The worker has been indicted, but the allegations have not been tested in court.
Acting deputy attorney general Trent McCotter said the Justice Department had charged 70 people since the Trump administration began with offences including unlawful voting and illegal voter registration.
The department has also announced a series of recent cases involving alleged non-citizen voting. On September 18, it said 16 people had been charged across the country in cases involving unlawful voting, false claims of US citizenship and related offences.
Experts say non-citizen voting remains rare
The latest figures represent only a tiny proportion of the more than 200 million active registered voters in the United States. Election law specialists and former officials have said the data does not support claims that non-citizen voting is widespread or capable of determining national election outcomes.
David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer and head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told the Associated Press that efforts to prove widespread non-citizen voting had repeatedly produced small numbers, even when the findings were presented in the most expansive way.
The Fair Elections Center has similarly said verified cases of non-citizens voting in federal elections are extremely uncommon. Researchers say apparent matches on voter rolls can reflect outdated immigration records, administrative errors or confusion between registration and the casting of a ballot.
President Donald Trump has nevertheless made non-citizen voting a central issue ahead of the midterms. He has signed two election-related executive orders aimed partly at tackling the issue, while his administration has pressed states to share detailed voter data and urged Congress to require documentary proof of citizenship for registration.
Those efforts have faced legal challenges. A federal judge has blocked use of a federal voter database sought by the administration, while the Justice Department has sued states and the District of Columbia in an attempt to obtain more detailed voter-roll information.
Homeland Security also reassigned employees from US Citizenship and Immigration Services to investigate state voter rolls after a whistleblower raised allegations about the department’s handling of the checks. State officials and voting-rights groups have warned that inaccurate database matches could wrongly flag eligible American voters.
What US law says
Federal law has prohibited non-citizens from voting in elections for president or Congress since 1996. Anyone convicted can face a fine, imprisonment of up to one year and deportation, while voter-registration forms require applicants to affirm their citizenship under penalty of perjury.
States are required to maintain accurate electoral registers and remove people who are ineligible to vote. Some local authorities in California, Maryland and Vermont, as well as Washington DC, permit non-citizens to vote in limited local elections, such as contests for school boards or city councils. Those rules do not extend to federal elections.
Federal prosecutors have stressed that allegations of illegal voting are investigated and charged where evidence supports it. But the number of cases disclosed so far has provided no evidence of the hundreds of thousands of non-citizen voters previously suggested by President Trump and officials in his administration.
