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Trump's gaslighting has already begun: expert

President Donald Trump's refusal to accept the 2026 midterm election results unless he wins has alarmed numerous experts. Now an expert on authoritarianism is explaining that Trump has already started laying the foundations for an excuse if Republicans lose as expected — and that this is part of his larger plan to overturn the result.

After reviewing cases in which Trump has used the full force of the federal government to persecute people accused falsely of voter fraud — a pattern that the author and her colleagues at Project Democracy are working through the courts to stop — the article argues that Trump has already brought upon America the early phases of authoritarianism.

"All of the helicopters, armed agents, press conferences, and propaganda are pieces of theater with one goal: convincing people that President Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud are true," wrote Project Democracy's Amanda Carpenter for The Bulwark on Thursday.

She added, "Over the summer, the Trump administration claimed 250,000 people were illegally registered to vote across the states of California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada—three of them led by Democratic governors. The government came up with these numbers by relying on a deeply flawed system that generates huge numbers of false positives."

She pointed out that "Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin previously said there were nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada—a claim that entirely evaporated under scrutiny. Instead of rethinking its methods, the administration is using the same kinds of lists to conduct high-visibility arrests and to pressure state officials to segregate ballots. But the administration escalated without evidence. Despite the claims of rampant fraud, the Department of Justice has charged only 156 people with voting-related offenses during Trump’s second term."

Speaking to AlterNet in September, a prominent law professor offered a different perspective on the threat Trump actually poses to American democracy.

Loyala Law School professor Justin Levitt — who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden as Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Senior Policy Advisor for Democracy and Voting Rights, respectively — told AlterNet that it is impossible for Trump to steal the 2026 midterms no matter how many possibilities he came up with. This observation came after this journalist listed five possible ways Trump could do it.

"None of them will work," Levitt told AlterNet. "Those five things, and 18 others, all sort of fall down at the point of possibility. You're absolutely right that he will try something: one, maybe several of those, or other things. But none of those things will succeed. And I can walk you through each and every one of them and point you to why they won't succeed."

Speaking to AlterNet in June, Common Cause voting rights advocate Dan Vicuña argued that regardless of how you look at it in terms of Trump's ability to steal the midterms, it is clear that he wants to do so.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He concluded, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

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Trump’s armed voter fraud hunt exposed by damning internal records

President Donald Trump has unleashed hundreds of federal agents, who have been pulled from criminal investigations, to hunt for suspected noncitizen voters in an armed operation across multiple states, according to internal Homeland Security records.

The documents describe a “Criminal Voter Fraud” initiative, and images and videos have shown Homeland Security Investigations agents going to homes with guns. HSI is an agency that typically investigates drug smuggling, money laundering and child exploitation cases.

According to CBS, uniformed agents knocked on doors, asking residents about their voter registration, previous election participation, and citizenship. Per the report, at least six states were included in “field reviews,” including California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.

HSI shared several images of agents who are armed, knocking on doors with the following caption: “HSI in Northern California will investigate any allegations of noncitizen voting and is committed to ensuring the enforcement of federal election law.”

A 23-year HSI veteran, Eric Balliet, told CBS that the operation is unprecedented in this time in the federal agency.

"In my 23 years with HSI, I never engaged in or was aware of any incident of initiative that sent Special Agents to private residences to verify the eligibility of voters," Balliet said.

The door-knocking campaign expanded as the November elections closed in September and continued in October.

Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla received information from a whistleblower in September that described hundreds of immigration-service employees being told to look into voter information, including that of American citizens.

According to the disclosure, employees only received one hour and 45 minutes of training before being handed 40 cases per day, describing what seems like a frantic effort. They also had about 12 minutes to examine each person’s voting status.

Per CBS, a video shows agents holding a document that says, "Target List." A HSI agent told the network that DHS is taking information from internal databases, voter rolls, and other unspecified data sets.

They then take that data and try to match the names against a citizenship registration from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

After allegations of massive voter fraud in California, the Justice Department announced Monday that it charged 28 foreign nationals in the state with offenses involving alleged unlawful voting, fraudulent registration, or related false statements. Eleven were arrested that day, and those charged represent just 0.0001 percent of California's registered voters.

Prosecutors allege that some defendants also misrepresented their voting histories on U.S. citizenship applications.

DHS has defended its operations, stating that they are conducted legally and its goal is to protect election integrity.

A lawyer for Protect Democracy, Jessica Marsden, accused DHS of attempting to “scare lawful voters from participating.”

DHS has claimed that as many as 250,000 noncitizens may be unlawfully registered nationwide, but so far they have investigated just 156 people since Trump returned to office.

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Trump attack dog has a bold Election Day plan —and critics say it's illegal

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin isn’t one to shy away from a fight.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The former professional mixed martial arts fighter once challenged the Teamsters president to a brawl in the middle of a Senate hearing and clashed with U.S. officials while unsuccessfully trying to mount his own rescue mission to Afghanistan during the chaotic 2021 American withdrawal.

Now Mullin is stepping to the forefront of the Trump administration’s battle to exert more control over the fast-approaching November elections.

Mullin has threatened to lock up elections officials and withhold federal dollars from states that don’t adopt the election security measures dictated by his agency. He’s suggested that ICE officers might enter polling places on Election Day if they are trying to arrest a suspect. And he’s directed agents to step up voter fraud investigations in nine states.

The cascade of tough talk has propelled Mullin into the heart of the Trump administration’s expansive efforts to remake America’s electoral system in President Donald Trump’s vision.

Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who worked in the White House under President Joe Biden on voting rights issues, said Mullin appeared to be driven by one overriding ambition: “Please the boss.”

“When the fourth grade soccer coach decides that everybody runs to the ball, everybody runs to the ball,” he said. “Regardless of what your actual job is.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

Mullin took over as secretary in March after the tumultuous 14-month tenure of Kristi Noem, who was forced out by Trump after a series of controversies, notably on immigration enforcement.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said during a confirmation hearing in March that barely touched on election issues.

Mullin emerged as a prominent public face of the Trump administration’s election overhaul in July when the president delivered a primetime address attacking the integrity of the nation’s voting system.

The next day, Mullin held a press conference at the White House complex, where he claimed his agency had found more than 250,000 noncitizen voters on the rolls in four states, challenged the integrity of voting machines, and threatened to jail election officials who didn’t do enough to prevent voter fraud. States have pushed back on those numbers.

Since then, Mullin has shifted more focus onto elections, declaring that “election security is national security.”

Last week, news broke that Mullin had directed hundreds of agents to focus their efforts on hunting down noncitizens on voting rolls across the country, even though there is no evidence of a widespread problem with noncitizens voting in U.S. elections.

Mullin also told reporters that he might send ICE agents into polling places on Election Day if they get reports of undocumented immigrants inside they are trying to arrest. That stirred up renewed concerns that the Trump administration would try to use federal forces to intimidate and deter voters from casting ballots — a federal crime, Levitt and others said.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson tried to calm fears by saying that “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” but that did little to assuage concerns.

“We have to respond in a very calm, collected way” to the Trump administration, said Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, who leads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. “We cannot respond in a chaotic manner that creates angst among the voters because we already know the administration is creating enough chaos.”

So far, Mullin’s efforts have had a limited impact. The Department of Homeland Security has quietly walked back its claims of 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls. In Nevada, for instance, the agency scaled back its estimate from 16,000 to 185.

The federal campaign to root out alleged noncitizen voting over the past month has led to the arrest of at least six noncitizens accused of voting.

Mullin has also asked the Justice Department to pursue an investigation into some voting equipment.

Levitt said Trump’s biggest leverage is the perception that he might seize ballots or send troops to polling places on Election Day, not that he would actually do so.

“My real fear is that people change their own behavior in response to the noise, rather than taking a breath and looking around and recognizing that the world outside their door doesn’t actually look like the communications world he’s trying to construct,” he said.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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The purge — and how the next election may already be decided

With virtually no mention or reporting in the corporate press, Republican-run states are again running the voter purge of millions that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2024.

Yesterday morning, Reuters published a special report on the ways the Trump administration could “interfere” with the midterms, noting that a lawyer in Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office bragged that his state had “taken a leading role in ensuring its voter registration list is purged….”

Yep, they used the word “purged.” They’re not even bothering with the polite terms anymore.

And it’s not like the Republicans really believe the mythology they’re trying to sell the rest of us. The GOP-aligned, billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation spent over a decade doing a deep dive into every state looking for voter fraud and noncitizen voters, examining every American vote since 2000 — more than a billion ballots cast nationwide — and found just 89 cases of non-citizen voters. In more than twenty years!

The libertarian Cato Institute did a similar analysis specifically on the 2020 election looking for any evidence that Trump’s claims were right that the election was “stolen” from him by “Mexicans” voting in the US election. They concluded the same thing:

“There are likely many problems with America’s voting system and there is no doubt that a non-zero number of non-citizens illegally voted, but there is no good evidence that noncitizens voted illegally in large enough numbers to actually shift the outcome of elections or even change the number of electoral votes.”

Nonetheless, Republicans keep promoting their lie that “illegals are voting” to justify massive purges of legal voters whose only crime is being Black, Hispanic, living in a college town, or being a big city dweller in a Red state. A likely Democratic voter, in other words.

And let’s not forget that hypocrite Trump himself is all in on encouraging voter fraud; at his “midterm convention” in Dallas a few weeks ago he had thousands of people raise their hands and repeat an oath after him:

“I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell...”

And the Reuters story comes three weeks after six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court let Trump’s DHS, run by former plumber Markwayne Mullin, turn an ICE immigration database called SAVE into a bulk voter-purging machine right in the middle of an election.

When Texas ran its registered voters through SAVE they purged thousands of people wrongly flagged as noncitizens; LULAC is suing to try to get these actual citizens voting rights restored.

Which all raises a question that I’ve been asking on the air (and in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting) for years:

“Why is it that if a Republican governor wants to take away your gun he has to go to court, but if he wants to take away your vote he doesn’t even have to notify you?”

You’ll recall that back in 2008 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court declared that we all have an absolute constitutional “right” to own a gun, and if any state or city wants to violate that right they have to go before a judge and present evidence that you can contest and even appeal all the way to the Supreme Court itself.

When we have a “right” in America and our government wants to take it away, they have to provide notice, irrefutable evidence, a courtroom and neutral judge, a finding, and a right to appeal. It’s called “due process” and is established by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

And in 1993, Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed a law establishing — without any ambiguity — that your vote is also a “right.” The National Voter Registration Act lays it out clearly:

“[T]he right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right,” and that “it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right.”

And the phrase “right to vote” also appears five times in the Constitution itself, more than any other right that document names (guns get a single mention).

So, why is it that Republican secretaries of state are bragging about the millions of Americans whose right to vote they’re “purging” from the voting rolls this year? And how are they getting away with using junk-mail-appearing postcards to justify those purges?

In 1981, the RNC sent letters to Black and Hispanic voters in New Jersey to “verify” their voting status; they built a challenge list of 45,000 people and posted off-duty cops at polling places in predominantly Black and Democratic Newark and Trenton to check names to challenge those voters.

The Democratic Party sued against this practice, called “caging” in the direct mail industry, and won a court order blocking the Republicans from doing it. That consent decree expired in 2018, though, the same year that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told Ohio Secretary of State John Husted that he could resume the practice, but this time instead of the GOP paying for it the cost of mailing the postcards could be covered by Ohio taxpayers.

Justice Breyer’s dissent pointed out the obvious fraud of it, noting that on average around 4 percent of Americans move their residence every year but:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because they [allegedly] changed their residences.”

Now the practice has spread to virtually every Republican-controlled state. They send out millions of postcards that look like junk mail and if you don’t return one and skip an election, you’re officially purged. They don’t even have to notify you; you find out when you show up on election day and they either turn you away or give you a “provisional” ballot.

During and after the 2024 election, my radio/TV show’s phone lines were jammed with people — many from big cities in Ohio and Georgia — complaining that this had happened to them and they’d just discovered it when they tried to vote. None had been notified.

And, sure enough, the provisional ballots were the tell that exposes this GOP scam. The Election Assistance Commission’s own survey of the 2024 election found that 1,736,209 Americans were shunted onto provisional ballots that year, and that the single most common reason was that the voter “did not appear on the list of eligible voters.”

Provisional ballots are often not counted at all, unless the voter shows up at the Secretary of State’s office before the final count to certify that they are, in fact, a legal citizen and voter.

Since the Husted decision by the Supreme Court allowing this bizarre practice, Republicans have put their corrupt system into hyperdrive. That same EAC federal survey found that GOP-controlled states sent out nearly 40 million “confirmation postcards” in just the two years between the 2022 and 2024 elections.

As a result, more than 21 million registered voters were stripped from the voting rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, and the most common justification was that they failed to return that junk-mail postcard.

Reporter and former statistics professor Greg Palast testified about this in federal court for the NAACP and, here on Hartmann Report, detailed how his team went through Georgia’s purge list person-by-person.

They found 198,351 Georgians who’d been cancelled even though they hadn’t moved and were still (mostly Black) citizens. In Wisconsin, where Harris lost by 29,397 votes, Republicans had purged 166,433 voters from the lists. Pennsylvania had purged 360,132 people, about three times Trump’s margin of victory in that state.

His conclusion was straightforward:

“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

In other words, your “right to a gun” is real but your “right to vote” is not, at least as long as corrupt Republicans control the Court and Congress.

Imagine, for example, what would happen if your county sheriff started confiscating guns from people who failed to mail back a postcard. The rightwing press would be hysterical and the Court would strike it down in a New York minute.

So here’s where we are today. Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff - ens - purger”) cancelled nearly 471,000 registrations last August, 6 percent of the entire state, the majority Democrats according to a Fair Fight analysis.

When Black Voters Matter asked for the records behind the purge, Raffensperger’s office handed over a stripped-down spreadsheet, and they had to sue him to try to get the names. Ohio’s Frank LaRose published a list of 352,389 names for cancellation just this past year, following a 2024 purge in which Ohio Democrats documented more than a thousand wrongly removed voters in Cuyahoga County alone.

Meanwhile Trump’s Justice Department has filed 31 lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to seize their full voter files, including driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, so the whole country can be run through his flawed SAVE purging database.

Republicans can’t win elections on their track record of taking away healthcare, gutting the Social Security administration, and handing massive tax cuts to billionaires, so they send postcards into Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and college towns. The only thing that’s changed since Jim Crow, in other words, is the technology.

Democrats in Congress tried to fix this situation in 2022 with the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. It passed the House and had a majority in the Senate, but every Republican in the Senate joined in a filibuster. If Kirstin Sinema and Joe Manchin hadn’t stabbed us all in the back by voting with Republicans to sustain the filibuster, these crimes against our democracy would be explicitly illegal, as they already are in every other advanced nation in the world.

Fixing this — codifying our “right to vote” per the NVRA from 1993 and with new legislation — has to be right up there with overturning the other most-corrupt action to come from Republicans on the Court aka Citizens United.

But none of that will ever happen if Republicans continue to control the House and the Senate so Trump can further disintegrate our republic and turn us into his beloved Russia before the 2028 election.

So, vote!

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MAGA activist's 'voter fraud' claims undermined by his own alleged registration irregularities

The MAGA movement is obsessed with "voter fraud" and "election fraud," and President Donald Trump continues to claim, without proof, that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. Many MAGA Republicans believe that undocumented immigrants are voting in U.S. elections in big numbers, offering no proof to back up that claim.

One of the many MAGA influencers who is making claims of widespread voter fraud is far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who, in 2016, promoted the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory (which falsely claimed that a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. was being used for child trafficking).

Voter fraud, Posobiec claims, is rampant.

But Slate reporters Jacqueline Sweet and Marisa Kabas, in an article published on October 3, allege that Posobiec's own voter registration raises some questions.

"The Republican National Committee, last fall, enlisted him to speak to poll watchers about election security," Sweet and Kabas note. "Posobiec is particularly focused on Pennsylvania, repeatedly accusing the state's Democratic officials of fraud, even spreading conspiracy theories that were followed by an RNC lawsuit."

Sweet and Kabas, however, allege, "The focus on voter fraud in Pennsylvania is particularly ironic because it sure looks like, and a trail of documentation suggests, that Posobiec is living in Maryland but voting in Pennsylvania. If so, that would be a violation of voting laws, experts say."

Sweet and Kabas allege that Posobiec "voted in Pennsylvania elections from 2004 to 2024, both in person and by mail, according to a copy of his voting record viewed by Slate and the Handbasket."

"There's nothing untoward about any of that, provided Posobiec actually lives in Pennsylvania," Sweet and Kabas note. But they allege that "Posobiec listed a Maryland address — the same one he and his wife show in social media posts — more than a dozen times in his 2024 political contributions, according to Federal Election Commission filings."

Attorney Adam Bonin, an expert on Pennsylvania election law, told Slate, "Your legal residence is where your life is rooted, the place you come back to. Usually, where your spouse lives is where you are presumed to live, but we look at the totality of the circumstances…. You only have one residence for voting, and you can't choose where you vote based on convenience or politics."

Read Jacqueline Sweet and Marisa Kabas' full article in Slate at this link.

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Trump admin's massive push to prove voter fraud just completely backfired

It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.

The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.

Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.

Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.

“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.

“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”

Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.

He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.

It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.

But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.

According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.

The administration plowed forward anyway.

HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.

Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.

There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).

The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.

Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”

Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.

Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.

Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.

Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.

To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.

Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser

Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.)

Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.

“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.

The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.

Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebook posts and reposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)

For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”

Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)

Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)

The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.

The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.

In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.

By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)

The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”

Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy

As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.

Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.

The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.

Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.

From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.

In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.

Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.

But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.

“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager

Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.

In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”

Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.

“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”

Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.

Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.

The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”

A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”

Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.

CREW filed a lawsuit in April on behalf of the nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause that argues it’s illegal for the administration to use the law enforcement exception to justify mass sharing of voter information.

Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.

“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”

Collapsing Claims

By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.

About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.

Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.

Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.

Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.

The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.

Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.

Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.

Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.

“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”

Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted

Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”

In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.

Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.

In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.

The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.

In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”

As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.

In the past, it was uncommon for federal prosecutors to pursue charges against noncitizen voters who didn’t understand that it was against the law for them to vote. Without evidence of a coordinated effort or plot, it didn’t make sense to put resources into such prosecutions, a former DOJ official who oversaw election cases said.

Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.

In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.

“Far-Reaching Consequences”

Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.

Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.

In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.

Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”

Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”

“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.

“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon

In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.

Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.

Its latest tactics include threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will prosecute state election officials who “knowingly” fail to remove noncitizens. Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the polls to intimidate voters.

“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”

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Watchdog warns of new voter suppression tactic exploding across America

WASHINGTON — Mass voter challenges are likely to occur in the 2026 midterm elections, the Brennan Center for Justice warned Tuesday, with the potential to “undermine the democratic process.”

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been laying the groundwork for questioning the election process in state after state, as Trump has made “election integrity” the centerpiece of his recent domestic policy initiatives, including in a July 16 address to the nation.

The center, at NYU School of Law, found in a report Tuesday that more than 185,000 challenges to voter eligibility were filed by private citizens in 2024, though “the real number is likely higher” since many election officials either were not contacted or sent incomplete responses to an inquiry. The center is regarded as left-leaning.

Mass challenges are a fairly recent development, spurred by improvements in election technology and transparency. Thousands of votes now can be challenged at once.

They’ve rarely been successful, but experts worry they create voter doubts about whether elections are being conducted fairly. Historically such challenges have also often been used to suppress the votes of people of color, a separate brief said.

“Eligible voters facing challenges sometimes don’t vote simply because the process is too confusing. Responding to a challenge requires numerous steps that can trip up voters. They may not understand their options for verifying their identity,” said the report by Brennan Center Counsel Andrew Garber.

Garber found that “mass voter challenges have become a key element in the campaign to use election integrity as a pretext for voter suppression.”

In 2024, he found, election deniers lodged challenges, “in addition to spreading lies about widespread voter fraud, refusing to certify elections, discrediting voting machines, engaging in bad faith poll watching, filing frivolous lawsuits, and threatening election officials with physical harm or criminal penalties”

This year, Garber warned, such challenges are likely to be an “integral strategy in the playbook to undermine the democratic process.”

Mass challenges, he said, “add basically zero value to elections while creating new costs.”

One big worry, though: “There are instances of eligible voters being removed from the rolls and learning of their removal after the deadline to register and vote in the next election,” the report said. “As is often the case with voter suppression, vulnerable individuals frequently suffer the effects.”

Mullin threats

The Trump administration is pushing state officials to examine their voter rolls and tighten their election security, thus opening the door for the help of the federal government in conducting mass challenges, the report predicted.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last week that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania and threatened to prosecute election officials in states that don’t “participate in securing the elections” ahead of the November midterms. He has not specified the source of his data.

Trump has demanded Congress require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote and photo IDs at the polls. So far, lawmakers have so far been reluctant to approve the SAVE America Act that in various versions would restrict voting, and it remains stalled in the U.S. Senate.

Trump and his allies have maintained for years the 2020 election was marred by voter fraud. No evidence of any widespread fraud has been found.

Election officials have largely maintained their rolls are accurate and up to date.

“In most states, list maintenance practices tend to keep pace with natural changes in voters’ lives, such as moving,” said a report this month by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Mass challenges

Recent mass challenges have rarely been successful.

The report cited efforts in Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Florida and Iowa in 2022.

“These challenges were widely rejected for lack of evidence or failure to comply with state law,” the Brennan Center found.

In 2024, Brennan’s research found that private citizens filed at least 185,232 voter challenges in the states studied. Of those, the center found officials accepted at least 5,477. That means they may have removed the voter from the rolls, declared them inactive or taken other steps to make it difficult for them to vote.

Researchers sent requests to Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas and to numerous counties in those states, the report methodology said.

“One takeaway is evident: With only around 3 percent of challenges clearly accepted, challenges contributed little to list maintenance in 2024,” Brennan found.

For instance, Georgia got in touch with about 875,000 voters in 2023 who had moved or had not voted for several years. That was more than a hundred times the number of Georgia voters who were successfully challenged the next year.

The center compiled the report by sending public records requests to 42 state and local government entities. It asked for any documents involving voter challenges in 2024 and how officials dealt with those challenges. It also looked at court filings, public reporting and election board meetings.

“Acquiring a complete record of challenges is impossible: They are often made ad hoc, officials may have no obligation to track them, and the records produced are often incomplete,” the center noted, adding that some officials refused to provide records or said they got no challenges.

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The Trump election trap nobody Is talking about

With just 97 days until the midterm elections of 2026, Democrats are fired up, while Republicans are in the doldrums. That means Democrats have a good chance of retaking control of the House. It’s even possible (although less likely) that Dems will retake the Senate.

One of the biggest uncertainties is what (if any) tactics Trump and his lapdogs will use to reduce the odds of a Democratic victory, especially in the House, where 435 seats are up for reelection.

I’ve spent the last several days talking with election experts and political advisers. When I spoke with them last year, they were most worried about gerrymandering, restrictions on mail-in voting, voter IDs, and the demise of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.

They’re still worried about many of these things (Trump just filed with the Supreme Court an emergency request to allow his executive order that restricts voting by mail, after a federal appeals court blocked key parts of it over the weekend).

But now, with 97 days to go, they’re most worried about the elections process. I’ve summarized their concerns below.

It’s possible that Trump will do nothing to interfere in the elections, of course. It’s also possible that he’ll do everything the experts fear he might do. Please weigh in with your thoughts about what he’s most likely to do.

1. He’ll do nothing other than claim the elections are rigged.

By this view, Trump will continue to sow doubts about the reliability and security of elections, especially in predominantly Democratic cities and states, but he won’t do more. Experts who hold this view tell me Trump doesn’t really care all that much about the midterm elections. His real goal is to continue to generate doubts about the 2020 election, so that when the history of that election is written, questions arise about whether Biden legitimately won.

2. He’ll deploy federal agents at voting places.

Some experts I talked with believe Trump will try to suppress voting by deploying federal immigration agents or federalized National Guard in or around polling places in predominantly Democratic communities during early voting or on Election Day. Or he’ll deploy federal agents in official attire to hover near voters, questioning them about their citizenship and asking about voter fraud.

It’s a federal crime for anyone — including federal, state, and local officials — to “intimidate, threaten, [or] coerce … any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] other person to vote or to vote as he may choose.” Most states also prohibit voter intimidation. Additionally, federal law explicitly prohibits the presence of armed federal agents at the polls.

But proving intimidation is difficult. Besides, by the time any lawsuit alleging intimidation were filed, voting would be long over.

3. He’ll try to stop state certifications.

Alternatively, election experts tell me that Trump will stop states with predominantly Democratic voters or large Democratic cities from certifying the results in House races. (Election rules about certification vary by state, but most require election officials to certify by late November or early December.)

In recent years, Trump has persuaded some local officials to use false claims of fraud or of noncitizens voting as justification to decline to certify election results. Since 2020, more than 30 local officials in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have refused to certify election results, usually in hopes of forestalling Democratic victories.

Experts tell me that if there are similar delays and refusals after November 3, Democrats will go to court to force local officials to certify results. They’ll probably win these cases, as they have in the past. But such litigation is inevitably accompanied by delays and uncertainty that could give Trump and Republicans time to whip up public support for recounts, audits, or similar tactics we saw after the 2020 election.

4. He’ll try to prevent the House clerk from assembling the roll of new members to be sworn in January 3, 2027.

A final scenario that’s been described to me is that Trump will prevent the House clerk from assembling the roll of new members to be sworn in. Normally, on January 3, the clerk simply goes to the House chamber with the roll of newly elected representatives. Although the people on that roll are not yet official members of Congress, they elect a new speaker of the House. The winner of the race for speaker then swears in the rest of the members of the House, and they then begin conducting legislative business.

But some experts predict that Trump will declare that the election is full of fraud and demand that Speaker Mike Johnson fire the current nonpartisan House clerk. Johnson could substitute a toady who produces a roll of new House members — one that includes Republicans in races that Democrats believe they won.

What can Democrats then do? They’ll contest Trump’s move in the federal courts, but the courts are reluctant to get involved in matters of internal legislative governance, regarding them as “political questions” that the judiciary should leave to Congress.

Hence, today’s Office Hours question: What’s Trump’s most likely move on the midterms?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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Republican: 'Kids playing wizard in the park' have better grip on reality than Trump

After days of speculation among election officials and experts about what President Donald Trump might say in a heavily hyped primetime speech on elections, Trump on Thursday night delivered a mix of familiar claims, grievances, and assertions about election security that stopped short of alleging that votes had been altered or that results had been changed.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Instead, Trump revived years-old evidence that China attempted to gather American voter data and that election systems are vulnerable to hacking, information that has long been public and that election officials said they have taken steps to mitigate. He also claimed to have identified 270,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls — election officials said they weren’t sure how that number was arrived at — and resurfaced old fraud allegations related to voter registration in Michigan.

In conjunction with Trump’s speech, his administration released newly declassified documents related to election integrity — some still heavily redacted — that in many cases did not fully back up the president’s claims.

“Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately,” Trump said, alleging that current election systems fall “catastrophically short of that standard.”

As he spoke, many secretaries of state from around the country were at dinner in South Dakota, closing out the summer meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State. Many did not watch the address, convinced after years of Trump’s election-related allegations that he was unlikely to say anything he hadn’t said before — though many staff members attending the conference did watch, and some secretaries issued statements later.

Trump concluded the speech by again calling for passage of the SAVE America Act, his top legislative priority, which would impose photo ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements on voters nationwide.

“The kids playing wizard in the park have a firmer grip on reality than any of this,” one Republican staff member said as he entered Mount Rushmore.

NASS bussed conference participants to the monument on Thursday night, shortly after Trump’s speech concluded, as part of a preplanned event on a day when red, white, and blue was the recommended dress code. Secretaries and their staff filtered past state flags into five reserved rows of seats as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” played and the sun set.

Election officials, experts respond to Trump’s election speech

Not all secretaries of state were in South Dakota, and some did watch the speech. “I have seen zero new facts. I have seen zero evidence backing any of these claims,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. “It appears to me to be a repackaged version of all of the stuff that we’ve known for years, and I was a little disappointed in the lack of new information.”

Election experts said the voting equipment vulnerabilities Trump appeared to be referring to in his speech have long been publicly known. “Everyone in this space knows that technology is vulnerable and works to put in safeguards and controls to secure it anyway,” said Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Hale said he was still reviewing the documents released by the White House, but pointed out that nearly all Americans vote on systems that require a voter-verifiable paper ballot, to ensure a paper backup that can’t be hacked.

One declassified document, quoted by Trump in his speech, stated, “We judge that U.S. adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.” But Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, noted that some components of election infrastructure — such as public-facing election websites — are more vulnerable than others — such as voting machines. “There was a lot of conflation, it seemed to me, of different types of technology, the vast majority of which doesn’t actually affect election outcomes,” she said.

According to Trump, China also illicitly acquired the data of 220 million U.S. voters. However, voter data is widely publicly available, and it wasn’t clear from Trump’s speech whether he was alleging that voter registration databases were breached. Trump did allege that “members of the deep state” tried to downplay China’s acquisition of the data, “covering it up from both the president and the American people.”

Election officials from various states were quick to clarify that their data was secure. “I have no information, either from the federal government or anybody else, that Arizona’s voter information has been compromised,” Fontes told Votebeat.

The Chinese government didn’t steal any Wisconsin election data either, Wisconsin Elections Commission appointee Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said on X. “If they bought our voter data, that is public data and they are allowed to buy it. So can you! So can anyone!”

Trump makes new claims about noncitizen voters

One new, or at least more specific, claim made by Trump in the speech is that there are 270,000 noncitizens registered to vote nationwide. According to a Department of Homeland Security memo released after the speech, that number appears to mostly be derived from a review of public voter files in four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who heads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said his office hasn’t heard from the Department of Homeland Security. “We don’t even understand how they calculated those numbers,” he said, adding that Trump “truly does not understand elections, not even at the basic level.”

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, said in a statement that the state follows all laws and requires voters to take steps to verify their identity before casting a ballot, adding that “all evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”

“We welcome DHS sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims,” Schmidt said.

The president and his allies have long alleged that voting by noncitizens is widespread, but election officials, audits, investigations, and academic research have found it to be extremely rare, and noncitizens who vote illegally are subject to criminal penalties and deportation.

Multiple states have audited their voter rolls and found tiny numbers of noncitizens registered, most of whom have never cast a ballot. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has made the search for noncitizen voters a driving force behind its election agenda. Last year, the administration revamped a Department of Homeland Security data tool, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, and encouraged states to use it to check their voter rolls for noncitizens.

States that did so reported finding relatively small numbers of potential noncitizens, and at least some of those flagged voters were later determined to be citizens, prompting many experts and election officials to warn that the SAVE program was unreliable.

For example, in Texas, officials flagged 2,724 potential noncitizens, some of whom county officials have determined are citizens, though it isn’t clear exactly how many. They’ve also found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through the Texas Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship, such as a passport, and keeps copies of such documents on file. In April, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, raised concerns about SAVE’s accuracy in a letter to federal officials.

In June, a federal judge blocked the overhaul of the SAVE program, saying it violated privacy and voting rights.

A Michigan case of suspected voter registration fraud

The president also spotlighted a six-year-old fraud allegation in Michigan as an example of election misconduct being “buried and covered up.”

Police reports showed that in the lead-up to the 2020 election, a woman working for a Tennessee-based company, GBI Strategies, submitted thousands of voter applications to the city clerk of Muskegon, a largely Democratic city. Most were legitimate, but the clerk identified irregularities with several hundred of them. The suspicious registrations were caught in time for the election.

The matter was initially investigated by Michigan State Police and Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, but the investigation was turned over to the FBI in March 2021. The story made headlines at the time, but it was largely ignored on a broader scale until 2023, when a conservative news site amplified old reports about it, and it has been an occasional Republican talking point in the state since.

Nessel’s office said in a statement Thursday night that the incident provided a “perfect example of the system working exactly as it should,” meaning the clerk noticed suspected fraud and flagged it before anyone could vote improperly.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state who is now running for governor, emphasized in a statement after the speech that the state’s elections are “secure and safe.”

“This was the case in 2020, 2022, 2024 and will be again in 2026,” she said in a release. “Because in every election, over 1,600 bipartisan professional election administrators and thousands of trained poll workers ensure that the law is followed and that every valid vote counts.”

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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'Stonewalled': Trump hitting a brick wall with his latest obsession

President Donald Trump continues to double down on his voter fraud fixation, repeating the widely debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and pressuring the U.S. Senate to pass the SAVE America Act as soon as possible — even if it means ditching the Senate filibuster. But according to Axios reporter Brittany Gibson, Trump's voter fraud claims are not serving him or fellow Republicans well.

"President Trump's voter fraud crusade is crashing into the limits of his power ahead of November's midterm elections," Gibson explains in Axios. "Why it matters: Trump has made cracking down on alleged mass voter fraud a priority, but his election-related executive orders are stalled in court and his legislative fix is stuck in the Senate…. Senate Republicans have defied Trump on the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote."

Gibson continues, "Trump has retaliated by threatening not to sign any legislation without it. But Senate Republicans insist they don't have the votes to pass it, even if they tried to gut their own rules in the process."

The Axios reporter emphasizes that resistance to his voter fraud obsession is coming not only from GOP lawmakers, but also, from federal courts that have "stonewalled" him.

"A D.C. court, on Monday, blocked Trump's expansion of the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database — to scan local voter files for noncitizens," Gibson reports. "The new database created a centralized list that includes data on U.S. citizens, not just immigrants. Another district court in Boston ruled, on Wednesday, against the implementation of one of Trump's first executive orders demanding a citizenship verification at registration. "

Gibson adds, "The administration is expected to appeal. This could eventually escalate the cases to the Supreme Court, which recently ruled in Trump's favor on immigration policy-related cases."

Trump's "defeats" in court, according to Gibson, "have raised the stakes for passing the SAVE America Act" — which he is describing as a "national emergency."

"Instances of voter fraud are rare, but searching for cases has become a priority for the executive branch," Gibson reports. "ICE agents and attorneys have been querying local election officials for specific voter files for 'ongoing cases.' They've obtained voter files in Webb County in Texas and Forsyth County in North Carolina. The Homeland Security Department installed election integrity activist Heather Honey, best known for questioning elections and voter rolls accuracy in Pennsylvania and Arizona, as a deputy assistant secretary. The Department of Justice is also suing multiple states to gain access to their voter rolls."

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Fire hose of 'bad news': Something major is breaking behind closed doors

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it is the pace of poor public behaviors that seem so galling or the various justifications that come to light in defense of those actions. In either case, the constant fire hose of Bad News is proving exhausting.

This week we heard a wide variety of government statements towards “enforcing” the rules or citing invented law to break them that land somewhere between weird and awful. Together, such brazenness just heightens the desire to do away with Team Trump’s leadership.

–The 19-year-old sailor who went overboard from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln this month survived and was rescued. His story capped the growing discontent over conditions for sailors on extended deployment off Iran for a war that no one can explain or end – public blowback that prompted the return of the carrier to homeport in San Diego. But last week, rather than buttress mental health support, the Navy brought military charges against the sailor for malingering and being AWOL in the Strait of Hormuz.

If this is War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s management thinking about how to handle mental health crises, it’s time for new management.

–The Solicitor General, the Justice Department’s lead before the Supreme Court, apparently baldly lied to the justices in arguing in documents that Donald Trump’s gilded ballroom rebuild of the White House East Wing was “65%” complete. But The Washington Post found pay records that said the contractor, who is to be paid for the percentage of completed work, was far less than that. The difference is not inconsequential; Justice is arguing that the work is too far advanced to be stopped by injunctions or a legal finding that Trump had failed to seek or obtain required congressional approval. We might want to pull the Solicitor General’s ticket.

–A lawsuit in Pennsylvania finally coughed up the answer to how a chain of Trump-praised, “Freedom Fuel Network” gas stations in the northeast has been able to offer low-cost fuel. According to the lawsuit, New Jersey businessman Syed Kazmi, and his company, KRSM, took more than a million gallons of fuel from a Mansfield Oil terminal but never paid for it, selling it at the discounted price. The judge ordered that KRSM must maintain sufficient bank balance to pay its bills.

–A federal judge overruled the Trump administration’s policy that suspended immigrant visa issuances for nationals from 75 countries, finding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had exceeded his statutory authority.

–A military judge tossed the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in the attacks on the World Trade Center as forced, undercutting the case that will come to trial next June. Prosecutors specifically had gone to a military court because they knew that a trial in a civilian federal court would run into rights issues and force disclosures that the government, which has held KSM in Guantanamo for all these years, would rather avoid. The families of 9/11, wonder if there will be any finding of guilt, while the spotlight over this year’s memorial has once again settled on Trump, who plans to skip it because local authorities won’t allow him to use the site as a campaign prop. This is so convoluted, it is hard to know where to turn.

Depends on Who You Are

–Somewhere around the time the sun was setting over Lake America, there was the crazy-making path of Trump trying to use the Postal Service to decide who can vote, based on some mystery name-matches that are off by the vast majority of cases so far. The Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Postal Service to continue to write a rule to halt delivery of mail ballot applications or mail ballots if the Post Office decides that the prospective voter might be an undocumented migrant.

That lasted a day, until the Postal Service published its incomplete rules and multiple lawsuits were restarted on an accelerated schedule. It will take more time for the courts to go through the procedural steps than for the deadlines to send out ballots to go out – in at least a couple of states this week. Trump has no legal authority in state-run elections, but that is not stopping him.

–Then again, the courts seem to have their hands full trying to decide when Trump can act unilaterally or not, whatever the law says. Trump is now threatening to destroy the Kennedy Performing Arts Center if he does not get his way to putting his own name on a building he has emptied for two years.

–Beyond all of this, innumerable immigrants on their way to legal check-ins were nabbed for deportation again this week, with new reports of soaring deportation detainments reflecting no criminal records – all without adequate justification from Homeland Security. This week the roundup happened to include conservative darling Milo Yiannopolous, a deportation booster who had overstayed his own tourist welcome by eight years. I would bet that arrest was a hit in the White House campaign to drive away populations unduly black, brown and poor.

–Vice President JD Vance was continuing his anti-fraud campaign around the country, happily disgorging findings of dubious origin about estimated possibilities of abuse in Medicare and Medicaid services by states led by Democratic governors. But he was silent about a Florida state grand jury report that concluded that Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer money it diverted to a charity connected to his wife, Casey DeSantis.

–Law enforcement by the FBI reflected a curious turn. CBS News reported that director Kash Patel, under pressure to recruit as much as 10 percent of the investigators to replace those whom he has fired or seen walk out, has changed FBI recruitment standards to ignore various crimes to remain eligible recruits. An internal memo said paying for sex, stealing from employers, or animal cruelty in the past should not disqualify those who arrest others for such crimes. Just make sure they are loyal to Trump.

It was just an average, slow August week of Equal Justice Under the Law in Trump’s ‘Golden Age.’

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

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