Inside the Trump administration’s controversial lists of alleged noncitizen voters

In the closing days of the midterms, the Trump administration has sent multiple states lists of what it alleges are noncitizens on the voter rolls, intensifying its controversial efforts to stop those people from voting in the election.

In California, the administration claimed there were 20,000 people who could be noncitizens on the rolls, while in Washington state, the administration alleged this week that 400 possible noncitizen voters had voted 1,500 times in past elections. The Justice Department sent letters to both states demanding they set aside the ballots of those the department claimed could be noncitizens — and sued California when the state said that the request ran afoul of its laws.

The demands this month of California and Washington marked a significant escalation of the administration’s efforts to hunt voter fraud by creating lists of potential noncitizen voters, one of numerous ways the federal government has tried to prove President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of mass voter fraud.

The allegations have sparked questions about how the administration created its lists of voters who could be noncitizens — and criticism that its claims of tens of thousands of noncitizens voters have whittled down under scrutiny.

State election officials and election experts have questioned the validity of the data the Trump administration is relying on to make its sweeping allegations — in addition to the decision to bring these demands to the states as early voting in the midterm election is already underway.

At a district court hearing Tuesday in the California case, attorneys for the secretary of state, Los Angeles County and outside groups argued that the federal government’s data was outdated, flawed and was a “recipe for disenfranchisement” of US citizens.

“This is a deeply troubling process, that is trying to use social security numbers that they’ve glued to the voter file, to go fishing for anyone who has an alien number,” said Anna Baldwin, an attorney arguing on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens and NAACP.

Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images

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Bill Essayli, first assistant US attorney for the Central District of California, argued that the federal government had “developed credible evidence” of noncitizens on the rolls that California refused to address.

Essayli argued that the federal government was trying to “protect votes of lawful citizens.”

While much of the case focused on whether the federal government could preempt state election law when the Constitution primarily gives the power to administer elections to the states, the circumstances surrounding how the government came up with the lists of voters were also a frequent point of contention.

Essayli offered to have the DHS officials who submitted sworn statements testify at Tuesday’s hearing to help explain the process that was used to determine the voters on the list were not citizens.

Instead, US District Judge David Carter, a Clinton appointee, said he’s appointing a special master to dig into the data provided by both the federal government and Los Angeles County, ahead of the state’s December 3 deadline to cure ballots.

Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals rejected the Justice Department’s California lawsuit on Monday in a 2-1 decision on procedural grounds. But the two judges who sided with the state, Trump appointee Mark Bennett and Biden appointee Gabriel Sanchez, both wrote in concurring opinions they also would have ruled against DOJ.

In his opinion, Sanchez wrote that California and LA County “have expressed serious doubts about the accuracy and reliability of the United States’ data and methodology used to generate this list and contend that this extraordinary request threatens to disenfranchise thousands of California voters.”

He asked several pointed questions during Sunday’s emergency hearing about the data and list the Justice Department was using to make its claims and how the Trump administration arrived at its conclusions.

“Your claims very much depend on the reliability of that list,” Sanchez said to DOJ attorney Matthew Donnelly.

The Trump administration has claimed even larger numbers of noncitizens on state voter rolls. After Trump’s July primetime speech on election fraud, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed there were more than 190,000 voters registered in California who “may be” noncitizens.

California was one of several Democratic-run states that Mullin singled out after Trump’s speech.

“We’ve identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in just four states,” Mullin told reporters, citing findings in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada.

While Mullin stated the figures as facts, those numbers have shrunk considerably under scrutiny in the months since.

In Nevada, for instance, DHS alleged it had identified 15,903 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. But in a follow-up meeting, DHS officials told the state they had “confirmed” just 185 Nevada registrants as noncitizens through manual review.

Nevada election officials pushed back. “As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens. You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise,” a Nevada official wrote to DHS last month.

Donnelly, the DOJ attorney, disputed this at Sunday’s hearing, however, saying that Nevada’s leaders were basing this solely on voters attesting they were citizens when they registered.

“That, candidly, we do not think constitutes proof that our list was invalid,” he said.

Asked about the downward shift in California from 190,000 voters to the 20,000 now being alleged, Donnelly said during Sunday’s hearing that the lower number was the result of further checks by DHS.

After a review of more than 100 million voter records across both Democratic- and Republican led states, DHS is still claiming it has found 300,000 “potential” noncitizens. As of mid-September, the agency had opened 1,620 investigations based on the review, and so far, the effort has led to around 160 arrests.

During Tuesday’s court hearing, Carter told Essayli that the government already had a way to handle noncitizens who voted. “You’ve got a remedy for goodness sakes, go out and indict,” the judge said incredulously.

A DHS spokesperson said in a statement that “190,000 remains the number of potential noncitizens registered to vote in California that DHS asked Secretary (of State Shirley) Weber to review.”

“The 20,000 referenced by DOJ is a subset of registrants that have gone through the manual verification process so far,” the spokesperson said, adding that the DHS process was a “commonsense step to secure our elections.”

DHS has been vague in correspondence to states about how it came up with its lists of voters it believes are noncitizens, but more details have emerged in the California lawsuit.

USCIS and Homeland Security investigations officials have said in court filings they obtained California’s public voter list in August 2025. While the voter list was obtained from the secretary of state’s office, DOJ redacted who specifically obtained it from the state.

The Trump administration “was supplied a list that was purchased” from California, Donelly said during Sunday’s hearing.

Earlier this year, DHS began analyzing the file, and it used a third-party system to further analyze the data and compare it to DHS immigration databases to identify potential noncitizens. Then, DHS officials say they checked the findings against federal databases and conducted manual checks of voter files.

“These processes resulted here in a culled list of people who are likely to be noncitizens and who registered to vote in the upcoming 2026 federal election,” wrote Nicolas Bartell, associated director of Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at USCIS.

Wren Orey, managing director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project, said the third-party information appeared to be used to “backfill personally identifiable information based on the information on the publicly available voter list.”

“That seems to me like a big risk that they were getting high rates of false positive matches,” Orey said.

While Donnlly said he did not know the third parties used during Sunday’s 9th Circuit hearing, Bartell wrote in his declaration this week that USCIS “enhances” the voter roll data through Lexis Nexis’ Accurint, a commercial data company.

In a whistleblower report filed with Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California, the whistleblower alleged that certain information not included in the source data was brought in through a process referred to as “supplemental magic.”

DOJ is relying on a voter list in California that’s publicly available, because the state rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to obtain its unredacted voter file, which would contain sensitive information like Social Security numbers. DOJ has sought unredacted voter lists from nearly every state and has sued roughly 30 states that refused to turn them over but has lost every court decision on the matter so far.

Christina McCall, an attorney for the state, argued that the government’s explanation doesn’t sufficiently spell out the way that the administration compiled its data — or how it even obtained the state’s voter rolls.

“They’re not reliable, they’re vague, and they lack personal knowledge,” she said of the state’s lists of alleged noncitizen voters.

Bartell stated in his declaration that USCIS compares the data it compiles against databases from the State Department and Social Security Administration to weed out US citizens on its lists who have a passport, confirming they’re citizens, or have died.

The immigration agency then assigns a “confidence level” for each possible noncitizen match, followed by a manual review. Those cases are then referred to HSI for further investigation.

Markwayne Mullin uses Homeland Security to further Trump’s voter fraud crusade

In separate litigation, which led to a federal court last week ordering DHS to stop certain investigative actions in its hunt for noncitizen voters, DOJ attorney Kelsey Helland argued that the groups suing did not have evidence that US citizens were impacted by the steps DHS took going from large list of suspected noncitizen voters to a smaller list of individuals who are investigated.

“That’s the initial step, and it goes through various sources of cross-checking databases, and there’s safeguards where USCIS officers are instructed not to keep going if it appears that a person is a citizen,” Helland said during a District Court hearing last week.

In that litigation, a redacted HSI official touched on the potential inaccuracies in the agency’s data. “When potential inaccuracies were identified in the USCIS lists, DHS sought further resources to prevent inaccuracies and developed a new model for generating leads for HSI’s unlawful voting investigations,” the official wrote.

Over the past year, DHS has also sought to identify noncitizens on voter rolls through its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database — known as “SAVE” — particularly in states that voluntarily turned over their unredacted voter files. The Supreme Court allowed the federal government to continue using SAVE for its investigations last month, but DHS said that the database was not used to compile the list it sent California.

Election experts say that it’s still not clear how reliable the DHS matches may be, especially given that the Trump administration is using a publicly available voter file, not the state’s list that contains personally identifying information like Social Security numbers.

“We still don’t have all the information about what kinds of databases are used. And then more to the point, what level of matching is sufficient,” said Derek Muller, an election law professor at Notre Dame Law School.

California has argued in court filings that the DHS voter file used to compile the list of 20,000 voters it believes could be noncitizens is based on data more than a year old and could be subject to false positives.

“The Executive’s own declarations describe a bulk data match that began with a voter roster more than a year old, obtained from an unidentified source, supplemented through an unnamed commercial platform, and compared against federal databases,” Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan wrote in a factual declaration for the case.

“Other states’ experience confirms why such matches require investigation and individualized proof,” Logan added.

Logan’s office took a sample of 200 voters from the 7,035 names with LA County addresses. His office found that of the 200 individuals, 42.9% had canceled voter registration records and 4.6% were considered inactive, meaning they were not mailed ballots this year, Aman Bhullar, an assistant registrar/recorder who works on IT and technology, wrote in a declaration.

Bhullar said that more than 71% of the sample had never voted, and 38.9% of those who had a birthplace reported indicated they were born in the US.

In Washington state, which received the letter from the Justice Department Tuesday, the secretary of state’s office noted that one of the 400 records was from 1994. “The system the DOJ uses frequently flags legitimate U.S. citizens as noncitizens, jeopardizing their legal right to vote,” the secretary of state’s office said in a statement.

In a new court filing this week, DHS officials pushed back on California’s sample of 200 voters. Bartell wrote in a declaration that UCSIS reviewed 51 voters on the DHS list “where California’s voter roll indicates the person claimed to be born in the United States.”

“After a thorough review of the immigration records of all the individuals on the County’s Sample List, it was determined that none of the individuals USCIS matched to the County’s Sample List were born in the United States according to USCIS records,” Bartell wrote, though he acknowledged four of the voters “might have a claim to U.S. citizenship,” even though they weren’t born in the United States.

CNN’s Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.

在中期选举的最后几天，特朗普政府向多个州发送了据称是选民名册上的非公民名单，加大了阻止这些人参加选举的争议性力度。

在加利福尼亚州，政府声称选民名册上有2万名可能是非公民的人；而在华盛顿州，政府本周指控有400名可能是非公民的选民在过去的选举中投了1500次票。司法部致函这两个州，要求他们搁置司法部声称可能是非公民的选票，并在加州表示该要求违反其法律后，对加州提起诉讼。

本月加利福尼亚州和华盛顿州的要求标志着本届政府通过建立潜在非公民选民名单来打击选民欺诈的力度显著升级，这是联邦政府试图证明唐纳德·特朗普总统毫无根据的大规模选民欺诈指控的众多方法之一。

这些指控引发了人们对政府如何创建可能为非公民的选民名单的质疑，以及对其声称的数万名非公民选民的说法在审查下大幅缩水的批评。

各州选举官员和选举专家对特朗普政府用来提出全面指控的数据的有效性提出了质疑——此外，他们还质疑在期中选举提前投票已经开始之际，将这些要求强加给各州的决定。

在周二加州案件的地方法院听证会上，州务卿、洛杉矶县和外部团体的律师辩称，联邦政府的数据已经过时、有缺陷，并且是“剥夺美国公民选举权的根源”。

“这是一个令人深感不安的过程，他们试图利用贴在选民档案上的社会保障号码，去搜寻任何拥有外国人号码的人，”代表美国拉丁裔公民联盟和全国有色人种协进会的律师安娜·鲍德温说道。

Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images

为什么特朗普在阿拉斯加和加利福尼亚提起的可疑选举诉讼应该引起人们的关注

加州中区联邦检察官比尔·埃萨利 (Bill Essayli) 认为，联邦政府已经“掌握了可信的证据”，证明加州拒绝处理名册上的非公民。

埃萨利认为，联邦政府试图“保护合法公民的投票权”。

虽然此案的大部分焦点在于，当宪法主要赋予各州管理选举的权力时，联邦政府是否可以凌驾于州选举法之上，但政府如何得出选民名单的情况也经常成为争论的焦点。

埃萨利提议让提交宣誓证词的国土安全部官员在周二的听证会上作证，以帮助解释确定名单上的选民不是公民的过程。

相反，克林顿任命的美国地区法官大卫·卡特表示，他将任命一名特别主事官，深入调查联邦政府和洛杉矶县提供的数据，以赶在加州 12 月 3 日选票补正截止日期前完成这项工作。

在周二的听证会之前，美国第九巡回上诉法院一个由三名法官组成的小组周一以2比1的投票结果，以程序性理由驳回了司法部在加州提起的诉讼。但支持加州一方的两名法官——特朗普任命的马克·贝内特和拜登任命的加布里埃尔·桑切斯——都在其协同意见中写道，即使没有司法部的支持，他们也会做出不利于司法部的裁决。

桑切斯在意见书中写道，加利福尼亚州和洛杉矶县“对美国用于生成这份名单的数据和方法的准确性和可靠性表示严重怀疑，并认为这一非同寻常的要求有可能剥夺成千上万加州选民的选举权。”

在周日的紧急听证会上，他提出了几个尖锐的问题，涉及司法部用来提出指控的数据和清单，以及特朗普政府是如何得出结论的。

“你的说法很大程度上取决于这份名单的可靠性，”桑切斯对司法部律师马修·唐纳利说。

特朗普政府声称，各州选民名册上非公民人数更多。在特朗普7月发表关于选举舞弊的黄金时段讲话后，国土安全部长马克韦恩·穆林声称，加利福尼亚州登记的选民中有超过19万人“可能”是非公民。

特朗普发表讲话后，穆林特别点名批评了加利福尼亚州，加州是几个民主党执政的州之一。

“我们已经在四个州发现了 25 万名非公民登记投票，”穆林告诉记者，他列举了加利福尼亚州、新泽西州、宾夕法尼亚州和内华达州的调查结果。

虽然穆林将这些数字当作事实陈述，但此后几个月来，在仔细审查下，这些数字已经大幅缩水。

例如，在内华达州，国土安全部声称已在该州选民名册中发现15903名非公民。但在随后的会议上，国土安全部官员告诉该州，他们通过人工审核仅“确认”了185名内华达州选民登记者为非公民。

内华达州选举官员予以反驳。“至于这185人，我们的记录显示他们都是公民。你们没有提供任何实质性证据来证明并非如此，”一位内华达州官员上个月致信国土安全部时写道。

然而，司法部律师唐纳利在周日的听证会上对此提出异议，称内华达州的领导人完全是根据选民在登记时证明自己是公民这一事实来做出决定的。

“坦白地说，我们并不认为这能证明我们的名单无效，”他说。

当被问及加州选民人数从 19 万下降到现在所称的 2 万时，唐纳利在周日的听证会上表示，较低的数字是国土安全部进一步核查的结果。

在审查了民主党和共和党执政州超过1亿份选民记录后，国土安全部仍然声称发现了30万名“潜在”非公民。截至9月中旬，该机构已根据审查结果展开了1620项调查，迄今为止，这项行动已导致约160人被捕。

在周二的庭审中，卡特告诉埃塞利，政府已经有办法处理非公民投票的情况。“看在上帝的份上，你们有办法解决这个问题，去起诉他们吧，”法官难以置信地说。

国土安全部发言人在一份声明中表示，“国土安全部要求（国务卿雪莉·）韦伯审查的加州潜在非公民选民登记人数仍然是 19 万。”

发言人表示：“司法部提到的 20,000 人只是迄今为止已经完成人工核实程序的注册者的一部分。”他还补充说，国土安全部的这一程序是“确保我们选举安全的常识性步骤”。

国土安全部在与各州的往来信函中一直含糊其辞，没有详细说明其如何得出其认为是非公民的选民名单，但加州诉讼案中出现了更多细节。

美国公民及移民服务局和国土安全部调查官员在法庭文件中表示，他们于2025年8月获得了加利福尼亚州的公开选民名单。虽然该选民名单是从州务卿办公室获得的，但司法部隐去了具体是谁从州政府获得该名单的信息。

唐纳利在周日的听证会上表示，特朗普政府“收到了一份从加利福尼亚州购买的名单”。

今年早些时候，国土安全部开始分析这份文件，并使用第三方系统对数据进行进一步分析，将其与国土安全部的移民数据库进行比对，以识别潜在的非公民。随后，国土安全部官员表示，他们将分析结果与联邦数据库进行核对，并对选民档案进行了人工检查。

“这些流程最终筛选出了一份可能为非公民且已登记参加即将到来的 2026 年联邦选举投票的人员名单，”美国公民及移民服务局欺诈检测和国家安全局副局长尼古拉斯·巴特尔写道。

两党政策中心选举项目总经理雷恩·奥雷表示，第三方信息似乎被用来“根据公开选民名单上的信息来补充个人身份信息”。

“在我看来，这似乎是一个很大的风险，因为他们可能会得到很高的假阳性匹配率，”奥雷说。

唐纳利表示，他不知道周日第九巡回法院听证会期间使用的第三方，但巴特尔在本周的声明中写道，美国公民及移民服务局通过商业数据公司 Lexis Nexis 旗下的 Accurint 来“增强”选民名册数据。

在提交给加州民主党参议员亚历克斯·帕迪利亚的一份举报人报告中，举报人声称，某些未包含在源数据中的信息是通过一种被称为“补充魔法”的过程引入的。

司法部目前依赖的是加州公开的选民名单，因为加州拒绝了司法部获取其未经编辑的选民档案的请求，该档案包含诸如社会安全号码等敏感信息。司法部已向几乎所有州索取未经编辑的选民名单，并起诉了约30个拒绝提供名单的州，但迄今为止，司法部在每一项诉讼中均败诉。

州政府律师克里斯蒂娜·麦考尔辩称，政府的解释没有充分说明政府是如何收集数据的，也没有说明政府是如何获得该州选民名册的。

“这些名单不可靠，含糊不清，而且缺乏个人了解，”她谈到该州所谓的非公民选民名单时说道。

巴特尔在声明中表示，美国公民及移民服务局 (USCIS) 会将其收集的数据与国务院和社会保障署的数据库进行比对，以剔除名单上持有护照、确认其公民身份或已经去世的美国公民。

移民局随后会为每个可能的非公民匹配对象设定一个“置信度等级”，然后进行人工审核。这些案件之后会被移交给国土安全调查局（HSI）进行进一步调查。

马克韦恩·穆林利用国土安全部来推进特朗普的选民欺诈运动

在另一起诉讼中，司法部律师凯尔西·赫兰德辩称，提起诉讼的团体没有证据表明，国土安全部从一份庞大的疑似非公民选民名单缩减到一份较小的调查名单，从而影响了美国公民。上周，联邦法院下令国土安全部停止在追查非公民选民过程中采取的某些调查行动。

“这是第一步，需要通过各种交叉核对数据库，并且有保障措施，指示美国公民及移民服务局 (USCIS) 官员，如果发现某人是公民，就不要继续进行后续程序，”赫兰德在上周的地区法院听证会上说。

在那起诉讼中，一位身份未被公开的国土安全调查局（HSI）官员谈到了该机构数据中可能存在的不准确之处。这位官员写道：“当美国公民及移民服务局（USCIS）的名单中发现潜在的不准确之处时，国土安全部寻求更多资源来防止此类错误，并开发了一种新的模式，用于为国土安全调查局的非法投票调查提供线索。”

过去一年，国土安全部还试图通过其“系统性外国人资格核查数据库”（简称“SAVE”）来识别选民名册上的非公民，尤其是在那些自愿交出未删节选民档案的州。最高法院上个月允许联邦政府继续使用SAVE进行调查，但国土安全部表示，该数据库并未用于编制其发送给加利福尼亚州的名单。

选举专家表示，国土安全部匹配结果的可靠性仍然不明朗，尤其考虑到特朗普政府使用的是公开的选民档案，而不是包含社会保障号码等个人身份信息的州级名单。

“我们仍然不完全了解使用了哪些类型的数据库。更重要的是，匹配程度达到什么程度才算足够，”圣母大学法学院选举法教授德里克·穆勒说。

加州在法庭文件中辩称，国土安全部用于编制其认为可能是非公民的 20,000 名选民名单的选民档案，是基于一年多前的数据，可能会出现误报。

洛杉矶县选民登记官迪恩·洛根在一份案件事实声明中写道：“行政部门自己的声明描述了一项批量数据匹配，该匹配始于一年多前的选民名册，该名册来自一个未具名的来源，并通过一个未具名的商业平台进行了补充，并与联邦数据库进行了比对。”

“其他州的经验证实了为什么此类匹配需要调查和个别证据，”洛根补充道。

洛根的办公室从7035个拥有洛杉矶县地址的选民名单中抽取了200名选民作为样本。他的办公室发现，在这200人中，42.9%的人已经注销了选民登记记录，4.6%的人被认为是不活跃的，这意味着他们今年没有收到邮寄选票。负责IT和技术工作的助理登记员/记录员阿曼·布拉尔在一份声明中写道。

布拉尔表示，超过 71% 的样本从未投票，在报告了出生地的人中，38.9% 的人表示他们出生在美国。

华盛顿州周二收到了司法部的来信，该州州务卿办公室指出，400份记录中有一份可以追溯到1994年。“司法部使用的系统经常将合法的美国公民标记为非公民，从而危及他们的合法投票权，”州务卿办公室在一份声明中表示。

本周提交的一份新的法庭文件中，国土安全部官员对加州抽取的200名选民样本提出了异议。巴特尔在一份声明中写道，加州大学安全情报局审查了国土安全部名单上的51名选民，“加州选民名册显示，这些人声称自己出生在美国”。

巴特尔写道：“经过对县样本名单上所有个人的移民记录进行彻底审查后，确定根据美国公民及移民服务局 (USCIS) 的记录，USCIS 与县样本名单匹配的人员中没有一人出生在美国。”但他承认，有四名选民“可能有资格获得美国公民身份”，尽管他们并非出生在美国。

CNN的蒂尔尼·斯尼德对本报道亦有贡献。