In recent months, the Administration has doubled down on its push to access and review state voter rolls with the stated goal of cracking down on fraud and threatened to withhold funding or prosecute election officials if they don’t purge any improperly registered non-citizens.
A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official tells TIME that the department’s principal investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI),“is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.”
Yet while Trump and DHS have claimed that hundreds of thousands of non-citizens are illegally registered to vote in states around the U.S., the number of people the Administration has so far charged in its efforts to crack down on such fraud are much smaller. Federal officials revealed in an update last week that DHS has pursued 1,600 voter fraud cases since January 2025, of which 160 have led to arrests.
Read More: Trump Keeps Railing Against Non-Citizen Voting. Research Shows It’s Extremely Rare
“There's no reason to think that there is widespread non-citizen voting,” Stephen Richer, an elections expert at the public policy think tank the CATO Institute, tells TIME. “And the federal law enforcement's announcements to date affirm that this is a minuscule issue.”
Two months after Trump returned to office last year, he signed an Executive Order directing DHS to compare state voter rolls against federal databases to “identify unqualified voters” and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prioritize prosecuting non-citizen voting in conjunction with states.
Over the summer, the Administration also threatened to withhold federal homeland security funding from states if they did not adopt a series of changes to their elections, including phasing out specific electronic voting systems and running voter rolls through a DHS database.
Those moves have faced challenges in court. Of the more than 30 lawsuits the Administration has filed in an effort to gain access to state voter rolls, 25 have been dismissed. Several of the other cases are still pending, while the DOJ has appealed many of the decisions against it. A judge on Monday meanwhile blocked the Administration from withholding counterterrorism funding from states that don’t meet its demands regarding their election practices.
And the Administration has additionally pressed for federal agencies and states to use its revamped version of a DHS database called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, to verify voters’ eligibility. The database, which has compiled records from multiple agencies in order to enable officials to check individuals’ immigration status, has drawn controversy, with critics contending that it violates voters’ rights to privacy and that its findings are at times inaccurate. But in a win for Trump, the Supreme Court last week permitted the Administration’s overhauled version of the database to be used in verifying the eligibility of voters ahead of the midterms.
Earlier this month, Democratic Sens. Alex Padilla of California and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York made public a whistleblower report that described the effort, called the “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” from the inside and alleged that federal personnel involved in the initiative may have employed illegal methods. The whistleblower alleged that DHS agents were being directed to use data acquired from a department database to effectively pose as voters or people acting at voters’ behest to access information on voter registration websites.
The Trump Administration has defended its methods in statements to media outlets in response to the allegations.
“The president just doesn't have a lot of authority flat out to intervene in the election system,” Levitt says.
States push back on the Trump Administration’s claims
In a July address to the nation, Trump made sweeping claims that 278,000 non-citizens were on voting rolls in the four Democratic-led states of California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. DHS then released what it characterized as a specific breakdown of the numbers of suspected non-citizen voters in those states the following day, without providing evidence to support the figures.
The department, which earlier informed Nevada that there could be as many as 15,903 non-citizen voters on their rolls, in August identified 185 people as non-citizens who had improperly voted in a list sent to the Secretary of State’s office. But when state election officials subsequently reviewed the 185 records, they determined that all of them were for U.S. citizens.
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar tells TIME that the Administration’s accusations about non-citizens on Nevada’s voter rolls have been “shockingly unprofessional because of the fact that they truly don't have a system or a process to professionally determine eligibility of voters at the state level.” Describing classifying citizens as non-citizens as “detrimental,” he contends that the Administration doesn’t take doing so seriously enough.
Aguilar adds that Latino citizens in particular have expressed fear over the possibility of encountering federal agents or being classified as non-citizens at the polls in November.
What data shows about non-citizen voting
Nation-wide studies and state audits have consistently demonstrated that non-citizen registration and voting are extremely rare.
The regular audits that states conduct of their voter rolls in an effort to root out any instances of election fraud have similarly turned up very few instances of non-citizens being registered or casting ballots. A 2025 Michigan Department of State audit, for instance, found only 15 credible cases of individuals who appeared to be non-citizens having cast ballots in the 2024 election out of more than 5.7 million total votes. In October 2024, Georgia officials reported that a similar audit had “conclusively” identified 20 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters, with nine having voted in previous elections.
“You've heard of the perfect crime. Non-citizen voting is basically the least perfect crime. There is always, literally always, a paper trail connecting the person to the deed,” he says. “It just doesn't make any sense for anybody to do … It's exceedingly, exceedingly, exceedingly rare.”
“The electoral impact on this is negligible, beyond negligible,” Richer says. “You have to have a realistic sense of just how big the problem is, and by all indicators to date, the problem is infinitesimal.”
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