Trump's voter fraud crackdown snags Republicans — and some who voted for him: report

President Donald Trump’s sweeping hunt for noncitizen voters has produced a scattering of cases, no evidence of an organized scheme and a revelation that undercuts his narrative.

The crackdown has turned up only a smattering of cases nationwide, but a Washington Post investigation found that Republicans and Trump voters keep turning up among those being charged.

Authorities have charged more than 180 people with illegally voting or registering to vote as noncitizens since the start of Trump’s second term, the Post found. Roughly 70 percent of them were charged in the last two months as the midterms approached, and nearly two dozen have been convicted.

None of the cases alleges an organized effort by Democrats or anyone else to bring noncitizens to the polls. Among the 61 defendants whose party affiliations the Post could verify, Democrats and Republicans made up about an equal share. Several told investigators they voted for Trump in 2024.

One of them, Jacqueline Wallace, a Jamaican green card applicant, registered as a Republican after a junior college employee asked her to sign up, and she voted in the 2024 Florida GOP primary, her attorney said. At her sentencing, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker called it an honest mistake and said it was “everybody from the leader of the free world all the way down” who was undermining faith in elections. He sentenced her to time served.

The administration has thrown enormous resources at the push. The Justice Department told all 93 U.S. attorney’s offices to prioritize the cases, and the Department of Homeland Security temporarily reassigned hundreds of fraud detection officers to look for illegal voters. DHS says it has reviewed more than 100 million records, but internal agency records reviewed by the Post show those efforts produced few results.

“In the course of my investigations, I found no widespread voter fraud,” said one Homeland Security Investigations agent, who spoke anonymously.

Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledged investigators haven’t uncovered a pattern and that some defendants may have been confused, but he insisted the growing tally should matter.

“At some point, it has to become meaningful to the media,” he said.

Some cases have collapsed in court. A federal judge in Miami dismissed one after ruling that the misdemeanor statute prosecutors use most often is unconstitutional. In another Florida case, an HSI agent testified that superiors told her to credit a Trump executive order at the top of every investigative report, and that federal agent refused to say, when asked, that Joe Biden's 2020 election win was legitimate. The jury acquitted the defendant in that case on all charges.

“It’s not happening at scale, and it’s isolated incidents across the country with no clear partisan pattern,” said Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame.

The Justice Department played down the criticism.

“A noncitizen ballot for a Republican is just as illegal as one for a Democrat, and the Department will prosecute both,” spokeswoman Kiersten Pels said, adding that many defendants falsely swore they were citizens.