The Trump administration has issued more than 100 subpoenas demanding records on tens of thousands of voters in at least a dozen states, as part of an escalating effort to uncover evidence of unlawful voting by people who are not United States citizens ahead of next week’s midterm elections, according to a Reuters investigation published on Wednesday. Most of the subpoenas were issued to state and local election officials in the past three months, and many had not previously been reported.
Noncitizen voting in US federal elections is illegal, and repeated studies have found it to be exceedingly rare. The scale of the subpoena campaign, documented by Reuters through public-records requests and interviews with local and state officials, is broader than previously known to the public, and legal experts quoted by Reuters said the records could figure in disputes over close midterm results.
FAKTA: Noncitizen voter subpoenas at a glance
- More than 100 subpoenas demanding voter records in at least a dozen states, most issued in the past three months.
- At least 44 subpoenas issued under grand jury authority, indicating they are tied to criminal investigations.
- States affected include California, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Washington, New York, Connecticut, Utah, Michigan, Texas, Kansas and Georgia.
- Prosecutions so far: at least 147 people accused of illegally voting under a federal statute since the administration returned to office, including 102 since the start of September.
- Administration position: the White House says noncitizen voting is a significant problem and that anyone who votes illegally will be held accountable.
- Critics’ position: election officials and legal experts say the cases found so far are tiny compared with the electorate and warn the campaign could cast doubt on close results.
Noncitizen voter subpoenas reach Democratic and Republican states alike
Many of the subpoenas were issued in Democratic strongholds, including Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other California cities. But they also reach into Republican-leaning states with competitive races, including Texas, Kansas and Georgia, Reuters reported. The demands varied widely in scope, from records on individual voters to entire local voter rolls containing tens of thousands of names. None of the jurisdictions contacted by Reuters said they were resisting the subpoenas.
In California, the Justice Department has issued at least 17 subpoenas to governments in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions, including Los Angeles and San Diego counties. Reuters also identified previously unreported subpoenas issued to Marin County and Fresno County; Fresno lies within California’s 22nd Congressional District, a closely watched midterm battleground.
Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington in focus
In Massachusetts, where federal courts had already blocked the administration’s demands for voter rolls, a US attorney has targeted at least eight cities and towns with grand jury subpoenas, six of them not previously reported. At least three of those subpoenas required officials to provide a full list of registered voters, including names, addresses, party affiliations, birth dates, voting status and voter identification numbers. An accompanying letter, obtained from one city through a public records request, urged recipients not to disclose the existence of the subpoena or their compliance, though it said the secrecy request was not mandatory.
In Lynn, Massachusetts, federal prosecutors subpoenaed records for 25 to 30 people. The city’s clerk and election chief, James Lamanna, told Reuters that so far only one instance had been found of someone voting in an election who should not have been voting, adding that this did not reach a level that would jeopardise the integrity of an election.
In Minnesota, subpoenas sought voting records on dozens of people in the Minneapolis-area counties of Anoka and Hennepin. The Justice Department has charged at least eight people from the two counties with voting as noncitizens; all the cases are ongoing and no one has been convicted. In Washington state, the secretary of state’s office said it had received about 60 federal subpoenas in recent weeks seeking information on individual voters, and federal prosecutors this week asked the state to set aside ballots from more than 400 people they believe registered to vote without US citizenship.
What the administration and its critics say
The White House said noncitizen voting warrants the sweeping federal effort, including the deployment of hundreds of federal law enforcement agents, and vowed to keep it a top priority. “The Trump administration is sending a clear message that anyone who illegally votes in our elections will be held accountable,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement to Reuters. “Only Americans should be electing America’s leaders.” The Justice Department declined to confirm or deny its use of subpoenas in noncitizen voter investigations, but said it “will enforce the law wherever the evidence leads.”
Election officials and lawyers told Reuters the investigations could bolster a narrative that American elections are vulnerable to widespread fraud, and could be used to challenge the legitimacy of narrow defeats. Paul Charlton, a former US attorney for Arizona, described the subpoenas as “clearly a distraction” for local and state election officials, noting that in his time as a federal prosecutor, cases of people voting who should not have were so infrequent as to never come close to altering an election outcome. Ben Berwick, a former Justice Department attorney who now leads the election law team at Protect Democracy, said the investigations were “setting up” post-election challenges that, while legally weak, could sow chaos.
Broader campaign over voter rolls
The subpoenas are one piece of a wider campaign. The Justice Department has sued 30 states that refused to provide voter rolls containing sensitive personal information, such as driver’s licence numbers and partial Social Security numbers, and courts have ruled against the department in every voter-roll case so far, with many cases still under appeal. A federal judge largely halted Homeland Security field operations in nine states on October 21.
In California, the Justice Department alleged this month that more than 20,000 “likely” noncitizens had received mail ballots and demanded any ballots cast by them not be counted until their citizenship was verified. California officials refused and called the list unreliable, saying a review of 200 registrations found nearly 40 percent appeared to be US-born. Acting US Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, who spearheaded the administration’s claims in California, acknowledged last week that the list could include US citizens, saying: “We’re not perfect.”
The stakes in next week’s midterms are high: Democrats need to gain four Senate seats and five House seats to take control of Congress. For more on US politics, see Watan News’ World coverage.
