Nearly 300k noncitizens found on voter rolls — total likely far higher
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A Department of Homeland Security review has identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens on voter registration rolls, a finding President Trump says should end Washington’s insistence that the American election system is secure.
Trump disclosed the number Thursday night while laying out what he described as a much broader election-security crisis involving outdated voter rolls, vulnerable voting equipment and foreign governments holding massive amounts of information on American voters.
The DHS review compared state voter files with federal records and found more than a quarter-million people who were not U.S. citizens but were nevertheless registered to participate in federal elections, according to the president.
That total may represent only part of the problem.
Trump said several Democrat-led states refused to provide their voter registration data for the review, preventing the administration from conducting a complete nationwide comparison.
“Since Democrat states refused to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that,” Trump said. “Yet, even this limited analysis found more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote.”
The review does not by itself prove that each individual cast a ballot. It does show that nearly 278,000 people who were not eligible to vote allegedly made it through state registration systems designed to prevent exactly that from happening.
Trump argued that the discovery cannot be dismissed as a harmless clerical problem, particularly when some states are fighting federal efforts to verify citizenship and clean their voter rolls.
“Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it,” Trump said. “It is not defensible.”
The president warned that foreign adversaries possess enormous quantities of U.S. voter information while American voting machines and ballot-counting systems remain open to hacking, manipulation and corruption.
He specifically accused China and other nations of working to interfere in U.S. elections, describing a system in which foreign governments have access to sensitive voter records while election officials at home resist basic eligibility checks.
Trump also said voter rolls continue to contain large numbers of deceased people alongside noncitizens who remain listed as active voters.
“Evidence of fraud has been buried,” Trump said. “Hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.”
The president contrasted those failures with the absence of voter identification and proof-of-citizenship requirements in many jurisdictions, along with the widespread use of mail ballots.
“And yet, we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail,” he said.
The findings strengthen Trump’s case for national election reforms requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register for federal elections. Democrats have fought those proposals, frequently arguing that noncitizen voting is already illegal and additional safeguards could make registration more difficult.
But illegality is not the same thing as prevention. The DHS review, as described by Trump, found hundreds of thousands of noncitizens already on the rolls before officials even received data from every state.
