--- title: What Trump's Intensifying Hunt for Non-Citizen Voters Is Showing description: Far from substantiating the President’s claims of widespread fraud, the results the effort is producing appear to underscore how rare non-citizens registering or casting ballots is. canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/09/29/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud-claims/ author: Connor Greene article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-09-29T20:01:56.233Z article:modified_time: 2026-09-29T20:01:56.518Z article:section: Politics og:title: What Trump's Intensifying Hunt for Non-Citizen Voters Is Showing og:description: Far from substantiating the President’s claims of widespread fraud, the results the effort is producing appear to underscore how rare non-citizens registering or casting ballots is. og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/09/29/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud-claims/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt715f34d032fe3e7a/6abc17759a32fddfeab9b8c3/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: What Trump's Intensifying Hunt for Non-Citizen Voters Is Showing twitter:description: Far from substantiating the President’s claims of widespread fraud, the results the effort is producing appear to underscore how rare non-citizens registering or casting ballots is. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt715f34d032fe3e7a/6abc17759a32fddfeab9b8c3/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # ‘The Problem Is Infinitesimal’: What the Trump Administration's Intensifying Hunt for Non-Citizen Voters Is Showing > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=23e0f4ee-1631-4305-b562-fc629d1d1620&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) by [Connor Greene](https://time.com/author/connor-greene/) ## Connor Greene Editorial Fellow Sep 29, 2026 8:01 PM UTC  President Donald Trump arrives to speak during an event to unveil the new America.gov website at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., on September 29, 2026. President Donald Trump arrives to speak during an event to unveil the new America.gov website at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., on September 29, 2026. Jim Watson—AFP/Getty Images by [Connor Greene](https://time.com/author/connor-greene/) ## Connor Greene Editorial Fellow Sep 29, 2026 8:01 PM UTC With the midterms approaching, the Trump Administration has ramped up its investigations into [non-citizen voting](https://time.com/7381495/trump-non-citizen-voter-fraud-claims-research-immigration/) around the U.S. But far from substantiating the President’s claims of widespread fraud, the results the effort is producing appear to underscore how [vanishingly rare](https://time.com/4669899/illegal-citizens-voting-trump/) non-citizens [registering or casting ballots](https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/the-false-fear-of-noncitizen-voting/) is. 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](https://time.com/article/2026/03/20/mail-voting-absentee-voter-fraud-trump-claims-research/) and [threatened](https://apnews.com/article/trump-voting-threat-states-3ec6b7838c97342965416756c0b83496) to withhold funding or prosecute election officials if they don’t purge any improperly registered non-citizens. In the lead-up to the November elections, the Administration has also [reportedly](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/us/politics/trump-election-voter-fraud.html) diverted a number of federal personnel to an effort to scour voter rolls for non-citizens—an initiative a [federal whistleblower](https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/padilla-schumer-announce-dhs-whistleblower-report-revealing-trump-administration-directed-officers-to-break-state-laws-in-voter-fraud-hunt/) has alleged may have involved methods that violate state laws. 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.” “We have repeatedly demonstrated that aliens can and do vote in our elections. Under President Trump, HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders,” the official tells TIME, citing four past instances of non-citizen voting they said the government has identified. “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear. We will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.” Yet while Trump and DHS have [claimed](https://time.com/article/2026/07/17/trump-speech-elections-china-save-act-takeaways/) 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](https://www.justice.gov/opa/video/department-justice-announces-enforcement-actions-related-election-integrity) in an update last week that DHS has pursued 1,600 voter fraud cases since January 2025, of which 160 have led to arrests. That arrest figure, which represents roughly 0.00009% of the roughly 174 million registered voters in the U.S., broadly aligns with the findings of previous research and state investigations that instances of non-citizen registration and voting are exceedingly rare. **Read More:** [_Trump Keeps Railing Against Non-Citizen Voting. Research Shows It’s Extremely Rare_](https://time.com/7381495/trump-non-citizen-voter-fraud-claims-research-immigration/) In Nevada, meanwhile, state election officials [said](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28681372-voter-roll-letter-to-dhs/) last week that after reviewing suspected non-citizens that DHS flagged on the state’s voter rolls, they had determined that every one of the voters was a U.S. citizen. “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.” ## How the Administration is attempting to find and prosecute non-citizen voters Trump, who has for years promoted false claims that non-citizen voting is a pernicious problem in U.S. elections, has made rooting out alleged voter fraud a focus of his second term. Two months after Trump returned to office last year, he signed an [Executive Order](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/preserving-and-protecting-the-integrity-of-american-elections/?cst=&query-11-page=119) 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. To that end, the Trump Administration has demanded that states turn over their voter rolls and sued dozens for not complying, arguing that the federal government requires the rolls to verify their accuracy. Over the summer, the Administration also [threatened](https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/22/politics/homeland-security-grants-election-changes) 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. The Justice Department later in the summer sent [letters](https://www.sos.mn.gov/media/h34ox5rq/772026-minnesota-letter-and-memo.pdf) to election officials in all 50 states warning them that they could face criminal charges if they knowingly allowed non-citizens to stay on voter rolls. 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](https://apnews.com/article/trump-voting-threat-states-ede327cf2d9d71869dd82cc9536b4a4c). Trump has also aggressively—and unsuccessfully—pushed for Congress to pass the sweeping [SAVE America Act](https://time.com/article/2026/03/10/trump-save-america-act-republicans-congress-voter-ID-senate-john-thune/), which would require voters to submit proof of citizenship documents to participate in elections, along with imposing other voter ID restrictions. 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 ](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/26a308%5Fpok0.pdf)last week permitted the Administration’s overhauled version of the database to be used in verifying the eligibility of voters ahead of the midterms. With the elections nearing, the Administration has also reportedly launched an initiative aimed at identifying non-citizens on state voter rolls and surged hundreds of federal agents to assist in the endeavor. Earlier this month, Democratic Sens. Alex Padilla of California and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York made public a whistleblower [report](https://www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/padilla-schumer-announce-dhs-whistleblower-report-revealing-trump-administration-directed-officers-to-break-state-laws-in-voter-fraud-hunt/) 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 Whistleblower has reason to believe that, with the knowledge and at the direction of leadership at headquarters, the Unlawful Voter Initiative has potentially already committed thousands of violations of state law in an effort to improperly access individuals' voter records,” the report reads. The Trump Administration has defended its methods in statements to [media outlets](https://www.npr.org/2026/09/14/nx-s1-5968892/dhs-whistleblower-voter-fraud) in response to the allegations. Justin Levitt, who served as the White House's first senior policy advisor for democracy and voting rights under President Joe Biden, tells TIME that “what the Administration is trying is unprecedented” because states have the authority under the Constitution to run their own elections without federal interference. “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 addition to fighting the Administration’s demands to access their voter rolls in court, states have also pushed back on claims federal officials have made about non-citizens registering and voting in their elections. In a July address to the nation, Trump made sweeping [claims](https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/president-trump-delivers-an-address-to-the-nation-jul-16-2026) 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. All four of the states pushed back against those claims. And in Nevada, state election officials dug into DHS’s figures and found them to be unfounded. 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. “What state and local officials are finding is that DHS's information is effectively hot garbage,” Levitt says. “DHS has stepped out into the world with some pretty implausible claims that have, on further examination, evaporated.” 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. “If you're going to try to take somebody's fundamental right away, you better have the ability and the facts and the information to accurately make the accusation,” he says. 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. “This is a direct attempt to dissuade and to interfere in elections and to prevent Latinos from voting,” Aguilar says. ## 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. A 2017 Brennan Center [survey](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/noncitizen-voting-missing-millions) that spanned 42 jurisdictions in 12 states found just 30 incidents of suspected non-citizen voting in the 2016 presidential election, a rate of roughly 1 suspected case per 783,000 votes. Of the jurisdictions included in the survey, 40 of them reported zero known incidents of non-citizen voting in 2016. 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](https://www.michigan.gov/sos/resources/news/2025/04/03/michigan-department-of-state-review-confirms-instances-of-noncitizen-voting-are-extremely-rare), 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](https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2024-10/FILE%5F7419.pdf) 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. Levitt says that there is simply no incentive for non-citizens, who can face hefty fines and deportation, to vote. “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.” And the rare instances when non-citizens do vote have no bearing on the outcomes of elections, Richer emphasizes. “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.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/09/29/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud-claims/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/09/29/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud-claims/"},"headline":"‘The Problem Is Infinitesimal’: What the Trump Administration's Intensifying Hunt for Non-Citizen Voters Is Showing","datePublished":"2026-09-29T20:01:56.233Z","dateModified":"2026-09-29T20:01:56.518Z","description":"Far from substantiating the President’s claims of widespread fraud, the results the effort is producing appear to underscore how rare non-citizens registering or casting ballots is.","url":"https://time.com/article/2026/09/29/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud-claims/","keywords":["Trump Administration","News Desk"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt715f34d032fe3e7a/6abc17759a32fddfeab9b8c3/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Connor Greene","jobTitle":"Editorial Fellow","url":"https://time.com/author/connor-greene/"}],"articleSection":"Politics","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt715f34d032fe3e7a/6abc17759a32fddfeab9b8c3/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud.jpg","caption":"","creditText":"Jim Watson—AFP/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/politics/","name":"Politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/trump-administration/","name":"Trump Administration"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/09/29/trump-non-citizen-voting-voter-fraud-claims/","name":"‘The Problem Is Infinitesimal’: What the Trump Administration's Intensifying Hunt for Non-Citizen Voters Is Showing"}}]}] ```