Trump team’s 250,000 noncitizen voter claim faces pushback
The administration says four states may have large numbers of noncitizens on voter rolls, but has not released its method or evidence.
By Frankie Delgado · News Reporter
4 min read
President Trump’s administration is pressing a bold election claim: more than 250,000 noncitizens may be registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin repeated the allegation Friday, but the administration has not publicly shown how it reached the number.
Mullin said the four states have not complied with federal demands to provide voter data. He also said 23 other states working with the administration found an additional 28,000 noncitizens on voter rolls after checking records against an overhauled federal database.
A White House official told reporters Thursday that the 250,000 estimate came from an analysis using commercial databases. David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told CBS News that such a method is likely to generate false positives and may count eligible voters as potential noncitizens.
Becker said during a CBS News special report that the data likely includes many people who are eligible to vote, and that states could be breaking the law if they removed those voters from the rolls.
The Center for Election Innovation and Research has said claims about noncitizens voting or registering often come from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations or fabrications involving complicated voter data. The group says confirmed cases of noncitizens voting are exceedingly rare.
The numbers in the four states
The Department of Homeland Security said Mullin sent letters to the secretaries of state in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania asking them to work with DHS on election security.
DHS said preliminary reviews indicated there may be up to 190,832 noncitizens registered in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania.
Neither Trump nor Mullin said those people cast ballots. The administration also has not released its full methodology.
The claimed 250,000 total would equal about 0.1% of the more than 211 million active registered voters reported nationwide for the 2024 general election by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. It would equal about 0.6% of the nearly 40 million registered voters in the four states in 2024.
Federal law bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections. The Bipartisan Policy Center says no state allows noncitizens to vote in statewide contests, though some municipalities in three states and Washington, D.C., allow noncitizens to vote in local races such as school board elections.
States push back
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said the state’s voter rolls are properly maintained and updated. He said Pennsylvania would review any information DHS provides, while adding that evidence shows noncitizen voting is extremely rare nationwide and in the state.
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, rejected the administration’s figure for his state, saying DHS had not provided evidence to support it. The New York Times reported that among Nevada’s 2.1 million active registered voters, 138 did not provide a state driver’s license or Social Security number when registering, though they may have used another accepted ID.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, said the state would review the federal government’s methodology. She said the information offered in Trump’s remarks and on the White House website did not inspire confidence in the method or conclusions.
Broader election push
Trump has long claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Dozens of lawsuits seeking to overturn results in battleground states failed, and the Justice Department said at the time there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
Since returning to office, Trump has signed executive orders seeking tighter mail-in ballot rules and documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration. Courts have blocked those measures.
DHS also changed the SAVE database so state and local officials can check citizenship or immigration status for voter registration. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., found the administration acted unlawfully in creating the centralized database and said some states had used it to wrongly remove U.S. citizens from voter rolls.
The Justice Department has sought full voter registration lists from nearly every state and Washington, D.C. The Brennan Center for Justice says more than a dozen states have cooperated, while the department has sued 30 states and D.C. Judges have dismissed 16 of those lawsuits, and one federal appeals court has ruled the department is not entitled to Michigan’s unredacted voter list.
This story draws on original reporting from CBS News.