President Donald Trump has for years claimed — without evidence — that there is widespread voter fraud in the United States. Listen to the White House, and you’ll believe that noncitizens are illegally voting en masse.
Journalist Jen Fifield found the Trump administration deployed Homeland Security Investigations — a force that’s normally tasked with combatting drug cartels and terrorism — with a nationwide campaign to identify noncitizen voters. And the results have been sparse.
Fifield, who is based in Arizona, was on the team that reported the story for ProPublica.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Jen.
JEN FIFIELD: Good morning.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. In this new investigation, you and your team dug into the Trump administration’s efforts to uncover his claims of widespread voter fraud in the country. They used HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, to do this. Tell us exactly what they did.
JEN FIFIELD: Well, we first got wind in January that Trump was trying to take this extreme step to try to prove his claim by drilling up tens of thousands of leads of potential noncitizen voters and giving them out to these Homeland Security agents. So we set out trying to understand how those leads came to be, and we found that HSI took publicly available voter rolls from the state, like you or I could purchase, and put them into its tech and databases despite warnings from insiders that it would produce this ungodly number of false positives.
So then they start pursuing these and they start crumbling as they investigate the leads that they were given. So ultimately, our investigation found that there have been fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters referred for prosecution in total in this second Trump administration and just 41 have been charged.
LAUREN GILGER: Forty-one, and that’s amid how many people voting in this country? Give us a sense.
JEN FIFIELD: One-hundred-fifty million voted in the last presidential election nationwide.
LAUREN GILGER: So just a massive gap there. They used, as you said there, this publicly available data on voters, these data voter rolls that anyone could get, but that’s different than what they were trying to get or are trying to get, right? We’ve seen this fight here in Arizona, where Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes has refused to turn over confidential voter information to the feds.
JEN FIFIELD: Well, right. So if you give the unredacted voter rolls ... this has the last four of your Social Security numbers or your driver’s license numbers. That would allow the federal government to do a concrete, hard match to find out who you are. The problem here is they’re just taking public voter rolls, which don’t include those unique identifiers, and trying to match them up with people they know who are immigrants in their Homeland Security database.
And obviously, as the leads fall apart, it’s clear we see across the country — specifically in Ohio and Texas, two states we really zoomed in on — that they even reach out to counties and find voters who have never lived there or registered to vote.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so that’s the false positives they were warned of. They were also warned that this could be illegal, right?
JEN FIFIELD: Privacy experts within the Department of Justice, once they found out that this sharing was happening of these public voter rolls over to HSI, they started throwing up red flags saying — one of them, a 29-year veteran, we found in an email said he slept on it and decided they shouldn’t be sharing all this. It would implicate the privacy of citizens across the country. They moved forward anyway.
LAUREN GILGER: What did the Trump administration have to say about those results? One-hundred-fifty alleged noncitizen voters referred for prosecution, fewer were charged, 41. Did they defend these massive efforts to get 41 charges?
JEN FIFIELD: Well, they don’t talk about the prosecutions. They talk about their large number claims. So DHS stood up on podiums in July and announced 250 potential noncitizens in just four states. So they’re putting out the initial claims, not what’s going to prosecution. They are defending this. They’re defending the data sharing as essential to secure our elections, and they’re saying that in the meantime, Homeland Security has continued with its mission and been able to combat cross-border crime as it does this work.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Let’s back up for a moment, Jen, and talk about the broader picture here. Voter fraud in the U.S. has been proven to be, as you found here, exceedingly rare over and over again, right? Put it into that broader context for us.
JEN FIFIELD: There’s been studies over time, over the years, since — mainly since Trump has started claiming this in 2016 that he lost the popular vote because of noncitizen voting. There’s been state audits that have found just 200 or so noncitizens registered in states, and ultimately very few of those voted. And if they did, a lot of times they thought that they could. People are sometimes confused if they’re a permanent resident in the U.S., they think they can vote. So these studies over time have all proven what the Trump administration is finding now.
LAUREN GILGER: Right, and when you say they thought they could vote, sometimes they’re even put accidentally by authorities on voter rolls, right?
JEN FIFIELD: Right. So in New Jersey, they just announced an error in state record keeping that put more than 6,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls, even though they had declared that they were not a citizen. So there’s administrative errors that come into play that a lot of those people don’t ultimately vote because they don’t even know they’re registered.
LAUREN GILGER: Jen, what do critics have to say here? This comes as the Trump administration is pushing for the SAVE Act, which basically federalizes elections in many ways.
JEN FIFIELD: Well, it’s just another step that Trump is taking to try to take more control over elections, to try to prove ... he won in 2020 as the main thing, and try to, before the midterms, stir up doubt about our elections even more than he already has.
LAUREN GILGER: We’ll leave it there. Jen Fifield with ProPublica joining us. Jen, thanks so much for your reporting here. Thanks for coming on.
JEN FIFIELD: Thank you.
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