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President Trump in a primetime address earlier this month again raised the specter of large volumes of migrants voting in U.S. elections, warning there could be more than 250,000 noncitizens among four state’s voter rolls.
But the Trump administration has not explained how it got that number, and correspondence sent to the four states reviewed by The Hill shows the federal government through a “preliminary review” found less than half that number — 118,000 — matched names and other information on file with the federal government.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which fired off letters to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California and Nevada, explained their methodology for reaching those figures.
The claims are additionally confusing as those states have refused demands by the Trump administration to turn over their voter rolls, raising questions over what data the DHS even reviewed.
“I have serious doubts about the reliability of your data and accuracy of your claims, since my office has not shared our statewide voter registration list with DHS or any other federal agency or official,” California Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin late last week in a letter obtained by The Hill.
“Indeed, state law prohibits sharing voters’ sensitive information, including social security numbers, with any person, including the federal government,” she wrote, adding later, “Notably, your letter provides no detail whatsoever that my office can use to evaluate the veracity of your allegations.”
In its letter to the four states, the DHS said it found names that match the birthday, address and Social Security number of someone in their files.
But several questioned how the department would know that since none of those four states were willing to turn over their voter rolls. All four have been engaged in litigation to bar the federal government from accessing the lists. Several Democratic-led states have sued over demands for their rolls and have won 16 out of 16 suits, so far, to block access.
Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), who represents a district in the Philadelphia suburbs, borrowed a phrase from former President George W. Bush in calling it “fuzzy math.”
“How’d they get those numbers? … How did they get those Social Security numbers? Because Al Schmidt responded and said, ‘We’re not giving you the voter rolls,’” she said, referencing Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of State.
“How do they know that? … It’s misinformation, if not direct lies.”
Despite repeated inquiries from The Hill, neither the DHS nor the White House provided any further detail about how they reached the figures, instead repeating information available in an initial press release.
Their top-line numbers are a significant departure from other studies conducted by both left- and right-leaning organizations that went looking for votes cast by noncitizens and found just a handful of confirmed cases.
The Brennan Center for Justice found 30 instances of noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes it reviewed in the 2016 election. The Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, found 24 instances of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections between 2003 and 2023.
Stephen Richer, a legal fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who studies election administration, warned of the “perils of using soft data matches,” noting that past efforts to comb voter rolls without complete data recommended removing significant numbers of legitimate voters.
“The problem is using anything short of a last four [of someone’s Social Security number] plus date of birth or 10-digit driver’s license in this world of hundreds of millions of registered voters and imperfect data files — it’s just — it doesn’t have a high accuracy rate,” he said.
Richer said it was odd that the DHS did not provide more information to the states to back its allegations.
“If it was really about identifying if we have an issue and correcting that issue, it seems like you’d want to give the states the individual voter records that you’re alleging are bad,” he added later.
“I can’t imagine any of those four states would say like ‘Go pound sand,’ if they gave them all the names that they’re alleging and how they did it. And then I would imagine the states would track those down, and then we’d have a much better chance of [knowing] if there’s a there there. But to just send them a list and with a number on it, what are you supposed to do with that?”
In letters to the states, Mullin initially claimed high numbers of voters could be noncitizens but only explained how they reached that conclusion for a portion of that figure.
For example, in Pennsylvania, he wrote that as many as 14,576 noncitizens could be registered to vote in the state but said the DHS found 8,594 names that aligned with noncitizens in its own database.
In New Jersey, Mullin claimed as many as 35,152 noncitizens might be registered to vote but said 19,497 had names and other details matching information in the DHS’s database.
The states involved each said they do constant voter list maintenance, which can involve scanning for those who have died, moved or may not be eligible to vote, including noncitizens.
Mistakes have been made, however. That point was made clear in a disclosure from New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D), who said software for the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) accidentally registered some 6,600 drivers who disclosed they were not citizens.
“These individuals answered ‘no’ when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway,” said Sherrill, who said the error occurred before she took office earlier this year.
Sherrill said fewer than 400 people who were accidentally registered later cast a ballot and noted they were registered as Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated.
She also took a shot at Trump, who she said “has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity,” adding that for “more than ten years, he has worked to undermine Americans’ faith in our elections by spreading lies about legitimate election results.”
Trump has a history of making claims about noncitizens and voting without providing evidence to back them up, including that Democrats wanted to encourage illegal migration as a way to boost their election prospects.
The DHS has not said how it accessed state data nor what internal data it compared the information with, but the department has been pressuring states to use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database for checking voters’ citizenship.
However, the database has been criticized for being flawed and out of date, with Democratic senators earlier this year calling it a poor tool for verifying citizenship.
Rep. Joe Morelle (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, which has some purview over elections, said the latest letters are part of a pattern of the Trump administration making claims it cannot back up.
“I think it’s actually [the] perfect piece of evidence that they don’t know what they’re doing and they don’t know what they’re talking about. I think they’re making this up out of whole cloth. We’ve seen no evidence of it. Their database is notoriously bad, as is the Department of Justice’s database, and in court they’ve acknowledged that we don’t have this information,” he said.
“So I don’t know where he got it from. The president said it. Mullin just says whatever the president says. But if you ask them to produce data that shows that that’s the case, there’s none to be had.”
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