Voter Fraud and Voter Suppression
If you’ve read my book, Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy, you’re familiar with the basic idea. Republicans have historically—they used this tactic during the civil rights era in the Deep South—used false claims of voter fraud to justify restrictive measures that make it more difficult, or entirely prevent, eligible citizens from voting. Donald Trump has mastered the art of using these kinds of fake narratives.
We explore that tonight.
Trump’s voter fraud claims have never made sense to anyone who stepped back to examine them. How could there be fraud that affected only Trump, at the top of the ticket, but not the Republican senators, House members, governors, and so forth who were elected on the same ballot? The same problem gives the lie to Trump’s claims that massive numbers of “illegal aliens” (or, as I think of them, people) voted in our elections. If that were true, how did Trump win and get GOP majorities in both houses of Congress? It doesn’t make sense. And that’s because it isn’t true.
The Supposed Fraud
Do some people who aren’t citizens register? Do a small number of them vote? According to the data compiled by states, the answer is yes, but the numbers are minuscule. Alabama’s MAGA Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen found 186 noncitizens registered to vote in Alabama in a January 2026 report and that 25 of them had voted in a past election. That’s 0.000675675676% of the 3.7 million registered voters in the state. In 2025, Allen claimed he identified 3,200 noncitizens who were registered to vote, before he walked it back.
Some data compiled by states that have conducted “proactive investigations since January 1, 2021 by election officials into the presence of noncitizens on voter rolls” has been collected here. It gives us a sense of the scope of the “problem.” For instance, in Florida, which has 13.4 million registered voters, the state referred 170 people who had possibly registered or voted despite being noncitizens to state and federal authorities. No word was given on the results of those investigations.
Even when red states conduct elections, the numbers remain small; instances of noncitizen voting are detected, and the numbers aren’t anywhere close to impacting the outcome of federal elections. State systems uncover and rectify problems, as they did in New Jersey, where a glitch in the system several years ago seems to have automatically registered noncitizens as they applied for driver’s licenses. The issue was discovered and resolved and Governor Mikie Sherrill, who was not in office at the time the problem occurred, made information about it public. We discussed it here.
No system is perfect. But there is nothing happening here that warrants the massive voter suppression plan Donald Trump has proposed in the form of policies like his executive orders on elections and the SAVE Act that would strip large numbers of voters of their rights. Trump has drilled up a non-issue into an outsized public narrative and a solution that is tailored to make it more difficult for the voters he fears the most to exercise their rights.
The Actual Suppression
Trump is willing to contemplate just about any measures, legal or not, to avoid an embarrassing and potentially painful loss in the midterm elections. What would happen to him if Democrats controlled one or both chambers in Congress and could conduct open investigations into misconduct by his administration, his family’s business activities, and the Epstein files? Trump doesn’t want to find out.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters this week that “reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy.” We’ve discussed the law that prohibits sending the military and federal agents to the polls. It’s a federal crime to order military or civilian armed agents (and federal agents are required to be armed when on duty) to the polls. Mullin’s threat is an illegal one.
Even if he wasn’t prohibited from doing what he says he’ll do, what exactly is Mullin anticipating? “Reports of specific undocumented immigrants” sounds like something that would happen in real time as voters lined up. Is he going to have agents staged and waiting for these reports to come in? Will he vet the veracity of anonymous tips before sending agents to the polls? Is he going to arrest first and determine citizenship status later, as his agency has been doing? In October 2025, ProPublica found that more than 170 American citizens had been held by ICE, many of them detained for days, since the start of Trump’s second administration. Mullin’s comments are rank voter suppression, a threat to people with brown skin that it would be safer for them to avoid the polls—and exercising their rights. That’s exactly the point of what Trump is doing.
That’s clearly the goal of Trump’s efforts to destroy voting by mail, and today, a skeptical Judge Talwani in Boston seemed poised to enjoin the government from proceeding with its efforts to restrict who the states can send mail ballots to, although she noted she’s not the last word on that subject, a reference to the fact that the Supreme Court will ultimately decide whether Trump can move forward with his voter suppression plans. It’s clear that the government isn’t ready to implement Trump’s cobbled-together plan. The New York Times reported that “the president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents 200,000 agency workers across the country, said no one in the union had received any training on how to use the new system.”
The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court today to ask it to lift the temporary restraining order the Judge has put in place against its efforts to throw the 2026 elections into chaos by inserting last-minute changes into the rules for mail voting. The nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures reckons that a number of states conduct elections almost exclusively by mail. This is the information they shared in that regard:
“Eight states and Washington, D.C., allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington state.
Two states permit counties to opt into conducting elections by mail: Nebraska and North Dakota.
Nine states allow specific small elections to be conducted by mail: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming.
Four states permit mostly mail elections for certain small jurisdictions: Idaho, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Mexico.”
Given the number of states that rely on delivering ballots to their citizens using the US Postal Service, an administration that insists on changing the rules for voting by mail 60 days in advance of an election can have no agenda other than trying to interfere with people’s right to vote.
That’s what this is about. Not voter fraud. Not noncitizen voting. It’s about attempted interference with our elections by the president. I hope you’re outraged. Outraged enough to do whatever it takes to make sure you vote and your vote gets counted this fall. Pass it on.
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We’re in this together,
Joyce