Trump's campaign against noncitizen voting demonstrates it's rare and not enough to swing elections

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration's campaign to root out noncitizen voting is demonstrating what critics of President Donald Trump's election conspiracy theories have long argued — that it's incredibly rare, difficult to prove and has not been shown to change the outcome of elections.

The administration has dedicated enormous resources to what election experts and administrators characterize as a comparatively small issue — noncitizens who, often due to misunderstanding the law, add their votes to the tens of millions of ballots cast during national elections.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced federal charges against 10 people in Minnesota alleged to have voted illegally over the last three elections, a period in which more than 8 million ballots were cast in the state.

“We’re focused on providing accountability and restoring trust in our elections,” Blanche said, lamenting that the media did not take seriously the charges for voter fraud his office has brought.

He said those added up to 90 for various types of election misconduct, including 50 against people who are alleged to have voted as noncitizens.

Even the 90 cases, which conflate voter fraud cases involving citizens of both political parties with those alleging noncitizen voting, are nominal in terms of the number of votes cast during presidential elections. It's nowhere near enough votes to swing any significant federal or even state election.

The U.S. had nearly 228 million registered voters for the 2024 presidential election, with more than 152 million ballots cast.

“They're incredibly low numbers no matter how you slice it," said Aaron Blacksberg of the Institute for Responsive Government, who was on a panel of election officials and experts on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., just before Blanche's announcement.

The continuing drumbeat from the administration about voter fraud and noncitizens casting ballots, even when their own investigations show it's rare, is one reason Democrats, civil rights groups and many election officials are bracing for the possibility of Trump intervening in the November vote.

The election officials who gathered with Blacksberg held a media roundtable during which they reassured voters that they are prepared for any possible disruptions this fall.

Democrats and civil rights groups have filed multiple lawsuits to try to prevent the Trump administration from sending armed agents to the polls, something the administration insists it will not do. Trump has lamented that he did not order the military to seize voting machines in 2020, leading many election officials and Democrats to brace for that possibility in the fall.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a letter to a U.S. senator last month that there are no such plans for the military.

The scarcity of actual fraud or voting by noncitizens was one reason why election officials, courts and some of Trump’s own officials rejected his claims that he lost the 2020 election due to massive fraud. Now back in office, Trump has launched a sweeping probe to try to retroactively prove his false claims. His administration has directed Homeland Security and other federal agents to scour voter rolls to identify noncitizen voters. A whistleblower statement filed earlier this month with Congress says the effort may violate state laws and gives agents only 12 minutes to determine whether a flagged person is actually a citizen.

Distinguishing any noncitizens on voter rolls from the many legal voters who may have similar names, birth dates or other identifying information is why many voting rights groups and Democrats have resisted the administration's aggressive campaign. They worry it would disenfranchise more legal voters than it would block illegal ones.

There's a history behind those concerns. In Kansas, a 2011 law requiring proof of citizenship to vote blocked the registration of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens before a federal judge declared the law unconstitutional.

Trump pushed Republicans to pass a law reminiscent of the Kansas measure, but it could not overcome resistance in the Senate from Democrats and even some Republicans. The president then tried to limit mail voting through executive action, but that was blocked by the courts and ultimately stopped from taking effect for the midterms by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The administration has routinely issued press releases noting large numbers of “suspected” noncitizen voters in certain areas, only to have to later amend the total to something far less.

In July, Trump claimed Nevada had 1,500 noncitizen voters on its rolls, but after his administration had to identify them to the state, the number of actual registered noncitizens turned out to be zero.

More recently, the top election official in Arizona's Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, announced that the Trump administration's noncitizen database flagged 60 possible noncitizen voters in a county where more than 2 million voters cast ballots in 2024. The actual number of illegal voters, disclosed by county prosecutors when they filed charges this week, was eight. The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to use that database to find purported illegal voters during November’s election.

Investigations in previous years resulted in similar findings. In Ohio, prosecutors secured indictments against nine people for voting as noncitizens over the span of 10 years. The state has some 8 million registered voters. During the presidential election two years ago, Georgia’s secretary of state found that just 20 of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters were not U.S. citizens.

On Wednesday, Blanche acknowledged that such cases were sporadic and not connected, undercutting the notion — promoted by Trump himself — that they are tied to some vast conspiracy to throw elections: “I don’t think we can say there’s a pattern we’ve identified,” Blanche said. “You know, I think that — that every case is different.”

Administration officials continued to toss around large-sounding numbers during the news conference. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed his agency “has 1,600 voter fraud cases that we're investigating and 300,000 more that we're getting to.”

Daniel Rosen, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, alleged that “the state itself fosters an environment that seems to encourage non-citizens to break the law and vote.”

In a statement, the office of Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, noted that it is a felony for a noncitizen to cast a ballot.

“These indictments affirm the fact that noncitizen voting is a vanishingly rare crime,” it said. “If these indictments result in convictions, that will amount to ten individuals over a period in which around 8.5 million votes were cast in Minnesota.”

Voters must attest that they are U.S. citizens when they register to vote. Violating that can be punishable as a felony, leading to jail time and deportation.

Blanche alluded to the complexity and effort that go into these probes.

“These cases aren’t easy, right? So if you get a list of suspected voters who shouldn’t be voting, whether they’re here illegally or they’re just not eligible to vote because they’re aliens, you can’t just go and arrest them. There’s a full investigation that” the federal government has to do.

Election experts say that's why federal law enforcement has traditionally not mobilized to combat an issue that is almost nonexistent. Most voter fraud cases are prosecuted locally.

“It does appear that there have been a lot of resources redirected away from things like violent crime and counterterrorism, which is where Homeland Security usually focuses its efforts,” said David Becker, a former Department of Justice attorney who now runs the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Becker added that it would not have been “unusual at all in past administrations to deprioritize” the voting focus because “it’s just such a small issue.”

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Riccardi reported from Denver.