By Peter Eisler, Ned Parker, Mike Spector and Tom Hals
Oct 28 - The Trump administration has issued more than 100 subpoenas demanding records on tens of thousands of voters in at least a dozen states, part of an escalating effort ahead of next week’s midterm elections to uncover evidence of unlawful voting by people who aren’t US citizens.
Most of the subpoenas documented by Reuters were issued to state and local election officials in the past three months, though some date to the start of the year.
Many were previously unreported, revealing a federal effort to identify potential noncitizen voters that is broader than publicly known. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in US federal elections. Legal experts say the records could be used to contest results in close midterm races, despite scant evidence that voting by noncitizens is widespread.
Reuters identified the subpoenas through public-records requests and interviews with local and state officials. Many 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.
At least 44 of the subpoenas were issued under the authority of grand juries, indicating they are tied to criminal investigations and making them generally harder to challenge in court than administrative subpoenas issued directly by federal agencies.
The White House says noncitizen voting is a significant problem that warrants the sweeping federal effort to identify and prosecute such cases, including through the deployment of hundreds of federal law enforcement agents. It has vowed to keep the effort 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.”
Multiple studies and a Reuters analysis have found that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare.
The subpoenas are one piece of an expansive campaign targeting noncitizen voting. Armed Homeland Security agents have questioned residents in several states about their immigration status and voting, while the Justice Department has sued 30 states that refused to provide voter rolls containing sensitive personal information such as driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. A federal judge largely halted Homeland Security’s field operations in nine states on October 21, and courts have ruled against the Justice Department in every voter-roll case so far. Many of those cases remain under appeal.
The subpoenas issued by the Justice Department and Homeland Security offer another way to obtain the same voter information, which legal experts say could figure in disputes over midterm election results. Elections are administered primarily by the states, with the federal government playing a limited role. Under most state laws, only losing candidates or voters can challenge election results, but the Justice Department could still take legal action to delay or block certification of winners.
Heavily Democratic California offers a glimpse of how such a fight could unfold. Its congressional seats could decide who controls the US House of Representatives. The Justice Department alleged this month that more than 20,000 “likely” noncitizens in California 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% appeared to be US-born.
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.” The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions.
Some election officials and lawyers told Reuters the noncitizen voting investigations could bolster a false narrative that American elections are vulnerable to widespread fraud. In a closely divided country, Trump and his allies could use those claims to attack the legitimacy of narrow defeats, particularly in tightly contested races, they said.
The subpoenas issued by the administration are “clearly a distraction” for local and state election officials, said Paul Charlton, a former US attorney for Arizona in the Republican administration of George W. Bush. “In my time as a federal prosecutor, we prosecuted people who shouldn’t have voted, but it was so infrequent as to never even come close to altering the outcome of an election.”
Since Trump returned to office, prosecutors have accused at least 147 people of illegally voting under a federal “voting by aliens” statute, including 102 since the start of September, according to a Reuters analysis of court filings and federal records. The cases – most of which remain unresolved – amount to fewer than one for every million people who voted in 2024.
The investigations are “setting up” post-election challenges that, while legally weak, could sow chaos, said Ben Berwick, a former Justice Department attorney who served in the Obama and Trump administrations and now leads the election law and litigation team at Protect Democracy, an advocacy group. Trump-aligned candidates who lose could argue that suspected noncitizen votes made it impossible to determine the rightful winner and seek to have ballots or even the election result thrown out, Berwick said.
The stakes are high. Democrats need to gain four Senate seats and five House seats to take control of Congress. Winning either chamber would give them power to launch investigations into the Trump administration and Trump family business dealings.
A BROADENING SEARCH
The subpoenas identified by Reuters varied widely in scope, from records on individual voters to demands for entire local voter rolls containing tens of thousands of names. None of the jurisdictions contacted said they were resisting the subpoenas.
In the US, subpoenas are legally binding orders requiring recipients to testify or produce documents or other evidence.
In Minnesota, a traditionally Democratic state with an unexpectedly competitive US Senate race, the Trump administration issued subpoenas for voting records on dozens of people in the Minneapolis-area counties of Anoka and Hennepin, where the administration has carried out a major federal immigration crackdown. To date, 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 California, the Justice Department has issued at least 17 subpoenas to governments in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions, including Los Angeles and San Diego counties. The state is home to at least two districts with competitive US House races and is typically slow to count ballots, with final results sometimes taking weeks.
Some voting experts said the Trump administration and its allies could use the period before California finishes counting ballots to amplify allegations of noncitizen voting and challenge the legitimacy of close races. Reuters also identified previously unreported subpoenas seeking voter records that were issued to Marin County and Fresno County. Fresno lies within California's 22nd Congressional District, a closely watched midterm battleground.
In Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold, local officials confirmed receiving at least four subpoenas for voting records. In reliably Democratic Massachusetts, one of the states where federal courts blocked the administration’s voter roll demands, a Trump-backed US attorney has targeted at least eight cities and towns with grand jury subpoenas, six of them not previously reported, Reuters found.
At least three of the Massachusetts subpoenas required officials to provide a list of all 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 this subpoena or the fact of your compliance therewith, to anyone,” but said the request for secrecy was not mandatory.
In Lynn, Massachusetts, a city with a large Hispanic population, federal prosecutors subpoenaed records for 25 to 30 people. “Up until now, they’ve found one instance of someone voting in an election that shouldn’t have been voting,” James Lamanna, the city’s clerk and election chief, told Reuters. “This doesn’t reach the level of something serious and pervasive that it would jeopardize the integrity of an election.”
Other states where subpoenas have been issued include Washington, New York, Connecticut, Utah and Michigan.
CLAIMS UNDER SCRUTINY
Trump has repeatedly portrayed noncitizen voting as a grave threat to election integrity. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has raised similar concerns for years, argues that weak verification procedures create opportunities for illegal voting and that voter fraud could affect the outcome of a close election. Voting-rights groups counter that repeated reviews have found no evidence of noncitizen voting on a scale that has changed an election outcome.
In a nationally televised address in July, Trump said his administration had identified more than 275,000 noncitizen voters, which the White House said were in four Democratic-leaning states. State officials disputed those assertions. In Nevada, federal officials initially claimed to have identified nearly 16,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls before revising the figure to fewer than 200. Nevada officials later concluded those remaining individuals were all citizens.
Federal prosecutors are continuing to report suspected new cases. In Washington state this week, they said they had identified more than 400 noncitizens who appear to be registered to vote. They asked state election officials to set aside any current ballots from those individuals until their citizenship could be verified. The Washington secretary of state's office told Reuters it has received about 60 federal subpoenas in recent weeks seeking information on individual voters.
The administration has also intensified its enforcement efforts. On October 19, the Justice Department said it had charged 28 people in California, all legal permanent residents, with voting as noncitizens or making false statements on voting or naturalization paperwork. California election officials have called the campaign a politically motivated distraction, noting that the cases uncovered so far amount to a tiny fraction of the state’s more than 23 million registered voters.
The administration has also threatened legal consequences for election officials who resist its demands. California officials objected after federal authorities threatened to prosecute election officials who did not act on the list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters. 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.
“We’re not perfect,” he said.
(Peter Eisler reported from Washington. Ned Parker and Mike Spector reported from New York. Tom Hals reported from Wilmington, Delaware. Additional reporting by Nate Raymond, Linda So and Indiana University’s Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism students, Emerson Elledge, Mary Demarco, Katherine Maners, and Kristen Dickey. Editing by Jason Szep)
