Inside the 'boogeyman' myth driving Trump's sweeping federal crackdown

Every week, it feels like President Donald Trump’s administration is making a new piece of news about elections. It is investigating past elections in at least four states. It is exploring what feels like every possible avenue to get ahold of voter data in individual states and counties. It is attempting to create new administrative hurdles to mail voting and prioritizing major voting legislation over all else.This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.But it all ties back to one thing: the repeated assertions from the president and his allies that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers. No evidence has emerged to support that. Election officials and experts have repeatedly said those assertions are false and such cases are rare. But they appear to be the animating force behind everything the administration is doing.Scattered reports that investigators for the Department of Homeland Security are requesting detailed data on individual registered voters confirm the administration’s ongoing focus on finding and prosecuting any such cases. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department was pressing prosecutors to focus on 90 open investigations into potential noncitizens voting as a top priority. Federal prosecutors have already brought some cases against individuals that officials are touting, including one in Louisiana last week.But despite the administration’s zeal, it isn’t clear how many such cases there are to bring. States have run more than 60 million records of registered voters through a revamped federal immigration database that the administration has encouraged state election officials to use to validate the citizenship of registered voters, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That’s around a third of the voters registered in the U.S., according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Out of those, the department told Votebeat, the system has flagged around 24,000 as potential noncitizens — about 0.04%. All those cases “have been referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation,” the department said in a statement.As Votebeat reported in April, the Department of Homeland Security is sending subpoenas to local elections officials in Texas, searching for detailed information about individual voters. Investigators have also contacted at least one county in North Carolina, a development reported last week by Axios.The Department of Homeland Security said it is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” and declined to comment on specific cases.Twenty-four thousand potential cases sounds like a lot, but election officials have already found that at least some of those potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens. It also isn’t clear how many of those people have actually voted. Experts across the political spectrum agree that noncitizens who don’t understand the laws may accidentally register to vote, so that in and of itself is not necessarily a sign of intentional fraud. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to questions about how many cases of noncitizen voting the agency has documented, or how many registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens. But administration officials and those who support the investigations have been quick to dismiss questions about whether the small number of cases means noncitizen voting isn’t a big issue. Last weekend, CNN anchor Kasie Hunt asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about data from the conservative Heritage Foundation that showed only 25 cases of people being prosecuted for voter fraud where citizenship was an issue. “Well, 25 is too many,” said Mullin. “It’s kind of like one illegal death, one individual that dies from the hands of an illegal is one too many. It’s all preventable. One person voting illegally is one too many. We shouldn’t have to worry about even one.”Justin Riemer, president of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a conservative nonprofit focused on voting issues, agreed with Mullin’s perspective.“Why is it such a bad thing that they are enforcing federal law?” Riemer said. “To me, any election crime is serious and needs to be prosecuted. I don’t think it’s a good system that this happens, regardless of how often it happens.”Ken Cuccinelli, who during the first Trump administration was acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said outside investigations are no substitute for federal investigations that have much more authority to examine potential fraud.