What to know about the Trump administration’s claim that 250K non-citizens are registered to vote in 4 states
What to Know About the Trump Administration's Voter Registration Claims
What to know about the Trump - Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Friday continued to amplify President Trump's assertion that more than a quarter of a million non-citizens were registered to vote in four states, though the administration has yet to provide details of how it arrived at that figure. In a news conference following Mr. Trump's address to the nation Thursday that focused on election security, Mullin said the alleged 250,000 non-citizens that it believes were registered to vote were in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada. Those four states have not complied with the Trump administration's demands to provide voter data to the federal government.
Examining the Data Behind the Claims
In 23 states that are working with the Trump administration and ran their voter records through an overhauled centralized federal database, Mullin said an additional 28,000 non-citizens were registered to vote. But CBS News found that the claims from Mr. Trump and Mullin about the prevalence of non-citizens registering to vote could be exaggerated. The estimate that there are 250,000 non-citizen registered voters across four states was based on an analysis of commercial databases, a White House official told reporters Thursday.
"I guarantee you, that data includes a ton of people, maybe even a majority of people, who are absolutely eligible voters, and states would probably be breaking the law if they remove those voters from the rolls," said David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
The Center for Election Innovation and Research has found that allegations of non-citizens casting ballots or registering to vote typically "appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data." When those claims are scrutinized and investigated, the number of alleged instances of non-citizens identified on voter rolls drops, the group said. Confirmed cases of non-citizens voting are exceedingly rare.
The president has long claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was "rigged" against him, though dozens of lawsuits seeking to reverse the outcomes in key battleground states were tossed out, and the Justice Department said at the time there was no evidence of widespread fraud. Still, amid the president's grievances about his loss to former President Joe Biden nearly six years ago, Mr. Trump has tried to expand the federal government's role in U.S. elections across his second term.
As part of those efforts, Mr. Trump has signed two executive orders that would tighten the rules for mail-in ballots and require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, among other requirements, though they have been blocked by the courts. And the Justice Department is suing dozens of states to hand over their voter rolls. The president has also been pressuring Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require Americans to show a photo ID to cast a ballot and present proof of citizenship in person to register to vote.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Here is what to know about the Trump administration's claims about non-citizen voting: Neither Mullin nor Mr. Trump said that the 250,000 non-citizens who are allegedly registered to vote in the four states actually cast ballots. The administration has also not made public its methodology for that estimate. Still, that figure represents a small percentage of the total number of Americans who were registered to vote in the last two general elections.
A survey conducted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that there were more than 209 million active registered voters for the 2020 contest, and more than 161 million people cast ballots that were counted. For the 2024 general election, the Election Assistance Commission said there were more than 211 million active registered voters and more than 158 million ballots were cast and counted.
That means the 250,000 non-citizens that the Trump administration claims are registered to vote in Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are roughly 0.1% of all registered voters nationwide. The figure represents 0.6% of the nearly 40 million people who were registered to vote across the four states in question in 2024. Federal law prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections, and no state allows non-citizens to vote in statewide contests, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.