The letters went to election officials in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, and they came with a clock. Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, gave officials five days to submit compliance plans and warned that anyone who 'knowingly retains noncitizens' on the rolls or 'facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots' could be 'subject to criminal liability' [1]. The threat assumes a problem large enough to warrant it. The documented record says the problem is a rounding error.
Noncitizen voting is one of the most studied claims in American elections, precisely because it is invoked so often, and the studies keep finding almost nothing. The Brennan Center's review of the 2016 election found that officials overseeing 23.5 million votes referred about 30 suspected noncitizen cases - 0.0001 percent of the ballots cast [2].
State-run audits by Republican officials reach the same floor. Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, reported after a 2024 review that of 8.2 million registered voters, 20 were noncitizens and 9 had ever cast a ballot - roughly one per million [3]. In Ohio, Secretary of State Frank LaRose flagged 521 registrations over four years; one person was ultimately charged [3].
Data
| National estimate (2016) | 1.3 per million |
|---|---|
| Georgia audit (2024) | 1.1 per million |
| Ohio (2019-2023) | 1.6 per million |
Scaled against that record, a five-day threat of criminal prosecution aimed at election officials in 51 jurisdictions is not a response to noncitizen voting; it is pressure applied to the people who run elections. The predictable effects are two: officials nudged toward aggressive purges of the rolls to limit their own exposure, and a chill on the routine work that keeps eligible voters registered. The problem the letters name is measured in single-digit cases per million; the tool they reach for is the criminal law.
There is a real subject buried here - states do remove ineligible registrations every year, and list maintenance is legitimate. What the documented record does not support is the premise the letters run on, that noncitizen voting is common enough to make local election officials criminal suspects. The audits, including the ones run by the administration's own party, put the number at about one in a million [2][3].
