Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
ProPublica published an investigation on August 14, 2026, titled "Inside Trump's Failed Hunt for Noncitizen Voters," examining how the Trump administration redirected Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) — an agency built to fight cartels and cross-border crime — into a nationwide search for illegal voting.
Key findings, based on DOJ data, internal emails, court filings, and records from the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward:
DHS claimed over 250,000 noncitizens were on voter rolls in four Democratic-led states (35,152 in New Jersey, 14,576 in Pennsylvania alone), but the investigation found the underlying data-matching was flawed and produced widespread false positives.
Between January 2025 and May 2026, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution nationwide, out of the roughly 150+ million people who voted in the last presidential election.
Only 41 people were actually charged, and just 14 resulted in convictions or guilty pleas.
In Minnesota, only a single case was referred; in Ohio, just two were referred and zero had been charged as of May.
The effort diverted HSI agents from major criminal work — including child exploitation, drug trafficking, and money laundering cases — to chase leads that mostly went nowhere.
Bottom line: a massive, resource-intensive federal campaign to prove widespread noncitizen voter fraud produced almost no actual fraud, reinforcing what election experts have long said — this kind of fraud is exceedingly rare.
ProPublica published an investigation on August 14, 2026, titled "Inside Trump's Failed Hunt for Noncitizen Voters," examining how the Trump administration redirected Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) — an agency built to fight cartels and cross-border crime — into a nationwide search for illegal voting.
Key findings, based on DOJ data, internal emails, court filings, and records from the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward:
DHS claimed over 250,000 noncitizens were on voter rolls in four Democratic-led states (35,152 in New Jersey, 14,576 in Pennsylvania alone), but the investigation found the underlying data-matching was flawed and produced widespread false positives.
Between January 2025 and May 2026, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution nationwide, out of the roughly 150+ million people who voted in the last presidential election.
Only 41 people were actually charged, and just 14 resulted in convictions or guilty pleas.
In Minnesota, only a single case was referred; in Ohio, just two were referred and zero had been charged as of May.
The effort diverted HSI agents from major criminal work — including child exploitation, drug trafficking, and money laundering cases — to chase leads that mostly went nowhere.
Bottom line: a massive, resource-intensive federal campaign to prove widespread noncitizen voter fraud produced almost no actual fraud, reinforcing what election experts have long said — this kind of fraud is exceedingly rare.
