Photo via Wikimedia Commons. File photo of the US Capitol, not a polling place in this story.
The Trump administration has issued more than 100 subpoenas demanding records on tens of thousands of voters in at least a dozen states, Reuters reported on Wednesday, in an escalating effort ahead of next week's midterm elections to uncover evidence of unlawful voting by people who are not 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, and many were previously unreported — revealing a federal effort broader than publicly known. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in US federal elections, but multiple studies and a Reuters analysis have found that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare, and legal experts told Reuters the records could be used to contest results in close midterm races.
How broad the subpoena campaign is
Reuters identified the subpoenas through public-records requests and interviews with local and state officials. At least 44 were issued under the authority of grand juries, indicating they are tied to criminal investigations and are generally harder to challenge in court than administrative subpoenas issued directly by federal agencies. None of the jurisdictions contacted said they were resisting the subpoenas.
The demands reach Democratic strongholds including Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other California cities, but also Republican-leaning states with competitive races, including Texas, Kansas and Georgia. In California, the Justice Department has issued at least 17 subpoenas, including to Los Angeles and San Diego counties, and previously unreported subpoenas to Marin County and Fresno County — Fresno lies in California's 22nd Congressional District, a closely watched midterm battleground.
In Philadelphia, officials confirmed at least four subpoenas. In Massachusetts, a Trump-backed US attorney targeted at least eight cities and towns with grand jury subpoenas, six of them not previously reported; at least three required officials to hand over lists of all registered voters, including names, addresses, party affiliations, birth dates and voter identification numbers. In Lynn, Massachusetts, federal prosecutors subpoenaed records for 25 to 30 people; the city clerk told Reuters that so far they had found one instance of someone voting who should not have been voting.
Part of a wider pressure campaign
The subpoenas are one piece of a larger campaign. 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, and armed Homeland Security agents have questioned residents in several states about immigration status and voting. 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, though many remain under appeal.
The campaign has also moved into individual states in recent weeks. The Justice Department alleged this month that more than 20,000 "likely" noncitizens in California had received mail ballots and demanded ballots cast by them not be counted until 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. In Washington state this week, prosecutors said they had identified more than 400 people who appear to be registered without citizenship and asked that their ballots be set aside; the Washington secretary of state's office told Reuters it has received about 60 federal subpoenas in recent weeks.
The Justice Department declined to confirm or deny its use of subpoenas in noncitizen-voter investigations, saying it "will enforce the law wherever the evidence leads." The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to Reuters' questions.
What officials and experts say
The White House says noncitizen voting is a significant problem that warrants the sweeping effort. "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."
Election officials and lawyers who spoke to Reuters warned the investigations could bolster claims that American elections are vulnerable to widespread fraud, and could be used to attack the legitimacy of narrow defeats. Paul Charlton, a former US attorney for Arizona under Republican President George W. Bush, called the subpoenas "clearly a distraction" for local election officials, saying that in his time as a federal prosecutor, prosecutions of people who should not have voted were "so infrequent as to never even come close to altering the outcome of an election."
The scale of prosecutions so far is small against the size of the electorate: 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 Reuters' analysis of court filings and federal records. Most cases remain unresolved, and the total amounts to fewer than one case for every million people who voted in 2024.
The stakes are high either way. Democrats need to gain four Senate seats and five House seats to take control of Congress, which would give them power to launch investigations into the Trump administration. With the November 3 vote less than a week away, the subpoena campaign — and how courts and election officials respond to it — is now part of the election story itself.
Sources: Reuters (more than 100 subpoenas, at least a dozen states, 44 grand-jury subpoenas, state-by-state details, White House statement, Charlton and Ben Berwick remarks, 147 prosecutions, California 20,000-person list, Washington 400-person request, voter-roll lawsuits, October 21 court halt); The Hindu / Associated Press (Washington request, 60 subpoenas to Washington, state response). Claims that noncitizen voting is widespread are disputed by studies and election officials cited by Reuters; the accused individuals' cases are ongoing and no convictions are reported in the Reuters account for the Minnesota cases.