Inside the Trump administration’s lists of alleged noncitizen voters

Key Points:

• The Trump administration has escalated efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls by sending lists to states like California and Washington, alleging thousands of potential noncitizen voters and demanding ballots be set aside, leading to legal disputes and criticism over data accuracy.
• California and Washington state officials, along with election experts, have challenged the validity and reliability of the administration’s data and methodology, citing outdated information and risks of disenfranchising lawful voters.
• The Justice Department and DHS have used publicly available voter lists, supplemented with commercial data and federal immigration databases, to compile their lists, but have faced scrutiny over the vague and error-prone process, including high rates of false positives.
• Courts have questioned the federal government’s authority to override state election laws and appointed a special master to review the data, while appellate judges expressed concerns about the potential disenfranchisement of voters based on unreliable information.
• Despite claims of hundreds of thousands of potential noncitizen voters nationwide, investigations have resulted in relatively few confirmed cases or arrests, and states have pushed back against the administration’s attempts to access unredacted voter files containing sensitive information.