US Noncitizen Voting Crackdown Yields 160 Arrests, Experts Say Fraud Still Rare

A federal initiative targeting noncitizens on state voter rolls has generated roughly 1,600 voter fraud cases and 160 arrests, a senior Homeland Security Investigations official said Tuesday, offering a rare update on an effort that has redirected federal resources and hundreds of employees.

The figures, released about six weeks before the midterm elections, fall well below the hundreds of thousands of noncitizen voters that President Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security had previously suggested were registered. They also represent a minuscule share of the country's more than 211 million active registered voters.

Speaking at a joint briefing with the Justice Department and the U.S. Postal Service, HSI official Matthew Millhollin disclosed the arrest data. The briefing also covered 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 the Justice Department had charged 70 people since the start of the administration with unlawful voting and registration offenses.

Neither official clarified what charges their figures covered or whether the two sets of data overlapped. HSI, part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, generally handles immigration-related crimes. A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

Election law experts said the numbers reinforce a long-established pattern. David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the administration has repeatedly tried to manufacture evidence of widespread noncitizen voting, only to produce very small numbers. He said the results confirm that states have done an excellent job keeping noncitizens off their voter lists.

Trump has made the issue a priority ahead of November's elections, which will decide control of Congress for the final two years of his term. He has signed two election-related executive orders, both tied up in legal challenges, pressured states to adopt a controversial federal voter database blocked by a judge over privacy concerns, and repeatedly urged lawmakers to pass a stalled documentary proof-of-citizenship bill.

In August, DHS ordered a group of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staff to shift to a full-time manual review of state voter rolls, according to a federal whistleblower's report. The whistleblower said the effort directs federal employees to misrepresent themselves on state voter lookup tools in ways that could violate state laws, and warned it relies on unreliable data that could wrongly implicate U.S. citizens.

In Texas, state election officials investigated 2,724 registered voters flagged as noncitizens by the federal database before a judge blocked its use. They referred 117 cases to the Texas attorney general's office, and in mid-September seven people were charged with illegally voting in federal elections or falsely claiming citizenship. Texas has about 18 million registered voters.

Becker said such outcomes are typical: the real numbers are consistently small. He added that he was not aware of any election whose result was altered by noncitizens voting.

McCotter argued that even a small number of fraud cases can matter. He said the right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election, and that the actions of even one malicious actor can fatally undercut that security.

Kathy Boockvar, a Democratic former Pennsylvania secretary of state who now runs a nonpartisan election security firm, said hyperbolic claims of fraudulent voting have real consequences for election officials. She said many people believe what they hear, contact officials, and sometimes threaten them, fueling antagonism against election workers.