Votebeat

A new Trump administration analysis claims noncitizens voted in 2020. Experts are questioning its validity.

2026-08-20T12:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump this week unveiled another effort by his administration to raise questions about the outcome of the 2020 election he lost: an unusual U.S. Census Bureau analysis concluding with “high confidence” that 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election.

Trump touted the finding on social media and wrote that it supports his long-running false claims that he actually won the 2020 election.

But experts said there are substantial questions about the Census Bureau study’s methodology and validity. And even if 24,000 noncitizens had voted in 2020, it wouldn’t have been enough to change the election’s outcome.

The seven-page Census Bureau report said researchers examined more than 128 million voters in the 2020 presidential election and determined with “high confidence” that more than 24,000 of them were noncitizens. If so, that number would be less than 0.019% of the sample.

Trump said census researchers are still analyzing another 32 million voters and predicted that the number of illegal noncitizen votes would “explode” after that was done.

The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. But experts said some aspects of the bureau’s release raise fundamental questions.

Most Census Bureau reports identify the authors of the report and detail the reliability of the data they are using. This analysis did neither.

“A properly done Census report would have had that information and the fact that it is missing is glaring and makes me think that they are hiding something,” said Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute who has worked as a contractor on Census Bureau reports.

Terri Ann Lowenthal, who served as staff director for the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee overseeing the Census Bureau from 1987 to 1994, said the report’s minimal methodological information raised questions about the accuracy of the results.

Lowenthal said the report was “beneath the Census Bureau’s stellar reputation.” The failure to include the names of any career staff members, she said, suggested that the work may have been done by someone with a political agenda “and may not reflect the sound, reputable analysis for which the Census Bureau is known.”

Trump administration searches for noncitizen voters

Trump has focused the efforts of his second administration on rooting out voter fraud, especially any instance of illegal voting by noncitizens, which audits, investigations, and studies have found happens only rarely. But the federal government doesn’t possess a comprehensive database of citizens, and efforts to match different data sets have so far yielded inaccurate results.

The administration pushed states to run millions of records of registered voters through a revamped federal data tool to check if they were citizens. But election officials found the system, which cross-referenced federal records from various federal agencies, in some cases erroneously flagged citizens. In June, a federal judge blocked the use of the overhauled tool, finding it threatened privacy and voting rights.

In a televised primetime speech on July 16, Trump said his administration had found more than 250,000 noncitizen voters on the voter rolls of just four states: New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Officials in all four states pushed back on Trump’s claims and said they didn’t understand how the administration arrived at those numbers. The Trump administration has yet to provide any detail on its methodology in that case either.

The president has lobbied for federal legislation to require people registering to vote to prove their citizenship, and he repeated that call when releasing the Census Bureau findings Tuesday, describing it as his highest legislative priority. But the effort has stalled in the U.S. Senate. He has also released two sweeping executive orders on elections, but their major provisions have been so far blocked by federal courts.

Questions surround Trump administration’s data analysis

The voting data used in the analysis was provided by Data-Clear, a business in Virginia that secured an $885,000 Census Bureau contract from former President Joe Biden’s administration in 2024. Carolyn Carlson, Data-Clear’s president and founder, said she provided nationwide voting data to the bureau that year as part of a project to try and prevent an undercount of minority voters in the 2030 census.

Carlson said she was surprised to see the data she provided used in the new review of noncitizen voters.

The report says the Census Bureau matched the Data-Clear voter files with federal immigration records to determine if people were citizens and eligible to vote. The report offers only general descriptions of how and when it was able to match verifiable information.

Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who worked in the Biden White House on voting rights issues, said a typical analysis would include caveats around the possible margin of error, and the 24,000 figure for noncitizen voters could be within it. However, the Census Bureau report doesn’t specify one.

“In most statistical exercises, it’s not unthinkable that there might be 0.019% false positives – and if that were the case here, that would turn the total conclusions to zero,” he said.

Should the analysis hold up to scrutiny, the underlying numbers showed that they would not involve enough voters to change the result of the 2020 election. The report said it found 500 noncitizens illegally cast ballots in Wisconsin, which Trump lost to Biden by more than 20,000 votes. The survey said it identified 1,100 noncitizens who cast ballots in Arizona, which Trump lost by more than 10,000 votes. And the report cannot say whether those voters supported Trump or Biden.

In response to questions about whether the release supported the president’s assertion, the White House responded with a link to a social media post by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

‘I don’t trust you’: Tensions reach boiling point on election security call for state leaders hosted by Trump administration

2026-08-17T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Tensions between state election officials and the Trump administration are rising as we head into the heart of the midterm election season. Frustrations boiled over on Monday during a rare election security call hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for state officials. During the call, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes unloaded on the agency.

CISA used to be a go-to shop for many states looking for help ensuring that their elections weren’t hacked, targeted, or undermined by cyberattacks or foreign interference. CISA provided states with classified security briefings on threats, helped ensure that state voting equipment wasn’t vulnerable to cyberattacks, and worked with election leaders to game out potential risks.

All that changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. The second Trump administration scaled back its support for states, cut back CISA staff, and launched an investigation of its former leader, whom Trump accused of disloyalty because he pushed back on the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. CISA has not had a permanent director since the start of Trump’s second term.

Changes at CISA have paired with the president’s broad focus on controlling how elections are run. The federal government is threatening to arrest election officials if they allow noncitizens to vote. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has vowed to withhold federal funds from states that don’t implement Trump administration election overhaul proposals. A coalition of Democratic states and officials has sued the Department of Homeland Security in a suit that accuses the Trump administration of withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency funding in an attempt to coerce states into enacting disputed election changes.

With all that as backdrop, CISA organized this week’s call – and things didn’t go too well.

After more than a year of near silence, elections officials wondered if CISA would step up to offer classified intelligence briefings on emerging cyber threats from hostile countries, specialized testing of election equipment, or training on how to prepare for potential problems on Election Day.

Instead, CISA leaders provided what one participant characterized as a generic “CYA” (cover your a**) briefing that offered state officials few assurances that the federal government would help thwart threats this November.

Participants said acting CISA Director Nick Andersen and Jim Harrell, the assistant director for integrated operations, offered no concrete support for the 2026 election, which is less than 90 days away. Instead, the participants said, CISA leadership seemed more focused on the 2028 presidential election.

When they were done, according to participants, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, lashed out at the CISA officials. Fontes blasted the Trump administration for threatening state election officials and made it clear he had no confidence in their leadership, they said.

“Fontes got testy with them,” said one participant on the call who asked not to be identified. “‘I don’t trust you,’ [Fontes told the CISA officials.] ‘Your boss came out there and said: We are going to criminalize the work you do. Why should we trust you?’”

When asked about the call, Fontes confirmed that he’d made those comments and expanded on his frustrations

“They don’t work with us, they work against us,” Fontes told Votebeat. “Why should I trust them?”

Fontes said it was difficult for state and local elections officials to have confidence they would get support from the federal government when the administration treats them like an adversary rather than a partner. He and others on the call said CISA leaders offered few assurances they would provide much support in the coming weeks.

“They just wholly and completely abandoned their duties and threatened prosecution,” Fontes said. “If they want to apologize for threatening us and ruining perfectly good systems, that’s a good start.”

CISA did not respond to requests for comment on the call.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, also a Democrat, echoed Fontes’s frustrations.

“It’s unhelpful to have political leaders, including the secretary of Homeland Security, hinting at imprisoning election administrators who don’t do what they want,” Simon told Votebeat. “That’s just not helpful.”

Simon said Minnesota and other states have spent months working to fill the gaps left by the drop-off in CISA support.

“It’s pretty clear states are almost entirely on their own this election cycle and cannot rely on the federal government for election assistance,” said Simon.

Not everyone on the call came away with a sour taste in their mouth, though. Some participants described it as a tentative move that could help repair the strained relationship between state and federal leaders working on elections.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, also a Democrat, described the call as a “positive step” in rebuilding relations between CISA and state election officials.

“While this engagement is encouraging, CISA and our other federal partners must focus on continuing to rebuild trust with election officials,” Hobbs said. “Over the last two years, we have watched this administration systematically dismantle many of the election security resources in place at the federal level.”

With the November election fast approaching, he said, “election officials need sustained commitment to supporting local elections, not renewed attention only as major elections approach. Meaningful support will do more to rebuild relationships than words alone.”

Pennsylvania asks Trump admin how it identified potential noncitizens registered to vote

2026-07-30T15:47:22+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Update, July 31, 8:52 a.m.: This story has been updated to include comment from the Department of Homeland Security.

Pennsylvania state officials are pushing back on the Trump administration’s claim that there may be more than 14,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote in the state.

In a letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said the federal government has not disclosed the methodology or data source it used to identify the noncitizens.

Schmidt also pointed out gaps in a program that the Department of Homeland Security uses to identify noncitizens.

“As you know, past analyses of voter lists have relied on faulty methodologies that can lead to inaccurate results and false claims about the citizenship status of eligible voters,” Schmidt wrote. “In fact, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official who oversees [the program] has ‘acknowledged that the system can’t always find the most current citizenship information for people not born in the U.S.’”

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump gave a primetime address in which he made several allegations of foreign election interference and issues with the nation’s voting systems. One of his claims was that the Department of Homeland Security had identified more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

In a letter to Schmidt the same day, Mullin wrote that a “preliminary review” had revealed “there may be as many as 14,576 non-citizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania.” A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State said Thursday that the federal government still has not shared the actual list of those people.

The Department of Homeland Security has not publicly disclosed, or disclosed to the other three states, precisely how it identified the potential noncitizen registrants. Letters to the states said the department used publicly available information but matched some of the potential noncitizens using Social Security numbers. All four states have refused to give the federal government versions of their voter rolls containing that information, saying state law prohibits them from disclosing it.

In a statement to Votebeat, the Department of Homeland Security declined to explain its methods but offered a pointed response to Schmidt’s letter. “If there are doubts, these officials should pick up the phone, not run to the press. Our offer to help them verify their voter rolls still stands,” a spokesperson said. “We look forward to working with them to ensure only Americans are electing America’s leaders.”

The system Schmidt was referring to — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program — has erroneously flagged some citizens as ineligible to vote. A judge recently blocked an overhaul of the program, citing in part the accuracy issues.

Dion Nissenbaum contributed reporting.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

The noncitizen voter mystery: New Trump numbers raise more questions than answers

2026-07-27T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The polarizing debate over noncitizen voters escalated last week when New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that an apparent software glitch had led to the unintended registration of 6,600 noncitizens between June 2023 and June 2024, 400 of whom voted in recent elections.

In a hastily called press conference, Sherrill placed the blame on her predecessor, fellow Democrat Phil Murphy, and said she was taking immediate steps to fix the problems.

Sherrill’s 20-minute briefing raised as many questions as it provided answers. How did a software glitch at the state’s motor vehicles agency lead to adding people who said they weren’t citizens to the state’s voter rolls? Who discovered the problem back in 2024? Why didn’t state officials alert the public when they first learned about the mistake? And what did state officials do about the people who were improperly registered at the time?

Sherrill, who took office in January and said she learned about the problems the week of July 13, said she’s ordered an independent investigation. That’s not good enough for Republicans in Washington and Trenton.

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding that New Jersey hand over the names of the 6,600 people by Tuesday. New Jersey Republicans question Sherrill’s software glitch explanation and are calling for a legislative investigation.

The New Jersey issue isn’t coming in a vacuum. President Donald Trump has long argued that ineligible noncitizen voters cost him the 2020 election, though no evidence has emerged to support that. His second administration has been focused on rooting out any noncitizen voting, and his top legislative priority is election legislation that he says will block it.

In a televised primetime speech on July 16, Trump said his administration had found 250,000 noncitizen voters on the voter rolls of four states: New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

Officials in all four states pushed back on Trump’s claims, and said they didn’t understand how the administration arrived at those numbers.

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar called the numbers “wildly speculative.” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt said that “all evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country.” Even in New Jersey, the 6,600 noncitizen voters discovered by the state did not come close to the 35,152 that the Trump administration claimed to have found in the state. “Do I think that the latest round that he has put out is in some way an attempt to undermine our elections in this country? Yes I do,” Sherrill said at her press conference.

How did the Homeland Security Department come up with the estimates? The Trump administration isn’t saying. But the letters the Department of Homeland Security sent to the four states to notify them of the findings provide some interesting clues.

For instance, the letters qualify the numbers in ways that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not in their public statements.

“We’ve identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in just four states,” Mullin said in a briefing the day after Trump’s speech.

But the letters are more careful in making that claim.

In California, for example, the letter from Mullin said there “may be as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California.” The letter then went on to say that the government found 81,336 registered voters in California’s public voter registration database with names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers that match those of noncitizens in federal files. That’s less than half the overall estimate; the letter doesn’t explain where the extra 109,496 came from.

In Pennsylvania, Mullin’s letter said the government matched the data of 8,594 registrants to a noncitizen, out of a total of 14,576 potential noncitizens it identified. Nevada’s letter said there were 8,576 matches out of 15,903 potential noncitizens. And according to the Shore News Network, New Jersey’s letter said there were 19,497 matches out of 35,152 potential noncitizens.

Altogether, these numbers in Mullin’s letters say the department has matches for just 118,003 of the 256,463 noncitizens the government is asserting have registered to vote.

The letters specify that Trump officials relied on each state’s public data files. All four of these states are among the 30 that have gone to court to block the federal government from getting access to unredacted versions of their voter rolls, which would include sensitive personal information, such as driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers.

The public versions of the voter rolls only include basic information about individual voters, such as their names and addresses, so it’s unclear how the government could have matched individuals based on social security numbers as it says it did.

It’s likely that even the 118,003 number is too high. States that have audited their own voter rolls for noncitizens or checked them against federal databases by using the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program have found noncitizen totals that are far less concerning.

Upon further investigation, several states have also found that SAVE — which works similarly to the methodology that Mullin apparently used — overestimated the number of noncitizens on their rolls, leading experts and elections officials to warn that the system was unreliable.

Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, called the 250,000 estimate “puzzling and concerning” and said there was no reason to believe the number of noncitizens on the voter rolls is actually that high.

“There are all sorts of reasons why you would get a huge number of false positives,” he said. “There is no reason to trust anything in the order of that 250,000 number. That will absolutely fall apart under any scrutiny.”

Correction, July 31: An earlier version of this story misstated the date of President Donald Trump’s primetime address on election issues. It was on July 16.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Trump rehashes claims of election vulnerabilities, foreign interference, and fraud in primetime speech

2026-07-17T05:02:34+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

After days of speculation among election officials and experts about what President Donald Trump might say in a heavily hyped primetime speech on elections, Trump on Thursday night delivered a mix of familiar claims, grievances, and assertions about election security that stopped short of alleging that votes had been altered or that results had been changed.

Instead, Trump revived years-old evidence that China attempted to gather American voter data and that election systems are vulnerable to hacking, information that has long been public and that election officials said they have taken steps to mitigate. He also claimed to have identified 270,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls — election officials said they weren’t sure how that number was arrived at — and resurfaced old fraud allegations related to voter registration in Michigan.

In conjunction with Trump’s speech, his administration released newly declassified documents related to election integrity — some still heavily redacted — that in many cases did not fully back up the president’s claims.

“Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately,” Trump said, alleging that current election systems fall “catastrophically short of that standard.”

As he spoke, many secretaries of state from around the country were at dinner in South Dakota, closing out the summer meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State. Many did not watch the address, convinced after years of Trump’s election-related allegations that he was unlikely to say anything he hadn’t said before — though many staff members attending the conference did watch, and some secretaries issued statements later.

Trump concluded the speech by again calling for passage of the SAVE America Act, his top legislative priority, which would impose photo ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements on voters nationwide.

“The kids playing wizard in the park have a firmer grip on reality than any of this,” one Republican staff member said as he entered Mount Rushmore.

NASS bussed conference participants to the monument on Thursday night, shortly after Trump’s speech concluded, as part of a preplanned event on a day when red, white, and blue was the recommended dress code. Secretaries and their staff filtered past state flags into five reserved rows of seats as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” played and the sun set.

Election officials, experts respond to Trump’s election speech

Not all secretaries of state were in South Dakota, and some did watch the speech. “I have seen zero new facts. I have seen zero evidence backing any of these claims,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. “It appears to me to be a repackaged version of all of the stuff that we’ve known for years, and I was a little disappointed in the lack of new information.”

Election experts said the voting equipment vulnerabilities Trump appeared to be referring to in his speech have long been publicly known. “Everyone in this space knows that technology is vulnerable and works to put in safeguards and controls to secure it anyway,” said Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Hale said he was still reviewing the documents released by the White House, but pointed out that nearly all Americans vote on systems that require a voter-verifiable paper ballot, to ensure a paper backup that can’t be hacked.

One declassified document, quoted by Trump in his speech, stated, “We judge that U.S. adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.” But Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, noted that some components of election infrastructure — such as public-facing election websites — are more vulnerable than others — such as voting machines. “There was a lot of conflation, it seemed to me, of different types of technology, the vast majority of which doesn’t actually affect election outcomes,” she said.

According to Trump, China also illicitly acquired the data of 220 million U.S. voters. However, voter data is widely publicly available, and it wasn’t clear from Trump’s speech whether he was alleging that voter registration databases were breached. Trump did allege that “members of the deep state” tried to downplay China’s acquisition of the data, “covering it up from both the president and the American people.”

Election officials from various states were quick to clarify that their data was secure. “I have no information, either from the federal government or anybody else, that Arizona’s voter information has been compromised,” Fontes told Votebeat.

The Chinese government didn’t steal any Wisconsin election data either, Wisconsin Elections Commission appointee Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said on X. “If they bought our voter data, that is public data and they are allowed to buy it. So can you! So can anyone!”

Trump makes new claims about noncitizen voters

One new, or at least more specific, claim made by Trump in the speech is that there are 270,000 noncitizens registered to vote nationwide. According to a Department of Homeland Security memo released after the speech, that number appears to mostly be derived from a review of public voter files in four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who heads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said his office hasn’t heard from the Department of Homeland Security. “We don’t even understand how they calculated those numbers,” he said, adding that Trump “truly does not understand elections, not even at the basic level.”

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, said in a statement that the state follows all laws and requires voters to take steps to verify their identity before casting a ballot, adding that “all evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”

“We welcome DHS sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims,” Schmidt said.

The president and his allies have long alleged that voting by noncitizens is widespread, but election officials, audits, investigations, and academic research have found it to be extremely rare, and noncitizens who vote illegally are subject to criminal penalties and deportation.

Multiple states have audited their voter rolls and found tiny numbers of noncitizens registered, most of whom have never cast a ballot. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has made the search for noncitizen voters a driving force behind its election agenda. Last year, the administration revamped a Department of Homeland Security data tool, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, and encouraged states to use it to check their voter rolls for noncitizens.

States that did so reported finding relatively small numbers of potential noncitizens, and at least some of those flagged voters were later determined to be citizens, prompting many experts and election officials to warn that the SAVE program was unreliable.

For example, in Texas, officials flagged 2,724 potential noncitizens, some of whom county officials have determined are citizens, though it isn’t clear exactly how many. They’ve also found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through the Texas Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship, such as a passport, and keeps copies of such documents on file. In April, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, raised concerns about SAVE’s accuracy in a letter to federal officials.

In June, a federal judge blocked the overhaul of the SAVE program, saying it violated privacy and voting rights.

A Michigan case of suspected voter registration fraud

The president also spotlighted a six-year-old fraud allegation in Michigan as an example of election misconduct being “buried and covered up.”

Police reports showed that in the lead-up to the 2020 election, a woman working for a Tennessee-based company, GBI Strategies, submitted thousands of voter applications to the city clerk of Muskegon, a largely Democratic city. Most were legitimate, but the clerk identified irregularities with several hundred of them. The suspicious registrations were caught in time for the election.

The matter was initially investigated by Michigan State Police and Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, but the investigation was turned over to the FBI in March 2021. The story made headlines at the time, but it was largely ignored on a broader scale until 2023, when a conservative news site amplified old reports about it, and it has been an occasional Republican talking point in the state since.

Nessel’s office said in a statement Thursday night that the incident provided a “perfect example of the system working exactly as it should,” meaning the clerk noticed suspected fraud and flagged it before anyone could vote improperly.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state who is now running for governor, emphasized in a statement after the speech that the state’s elections are “secure and safe.”

“This was the case in 2020, 2022, 2024 and will be again in 2026,” she said in a release. “Because in every election, over 1,600 bipartisan professional election administrators and thousands of trained poll workers ensure that the law is followed and that every valid vote counts.”

Trump teases ‘very big announcement’ about elections, but it’s unclear what it will be

2026-07-16T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Election watchers are buzzing about President Donald Trump’s speech to the nation on Thursday night — but so far, no one has any concrete idea what he’s going to say.

The White House has scheduled a rare primetime address for Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said the address would touch on multiple subjects but include a “very big announcement” about election security. “It’s really, really big news,” he said. “Without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”

Trump, of course, has said many things about the integrity of U.S. elections, few of them true. He has claimed repeatedly that voter fraud is rampant and cost him the 2020 election, despite numerous investigations and audits that have found no evidence of that.

Nevertheless, since Trump retook office last year, his administration has reopened investigations into that election on several fronts: The FBI seized ballots from an election office in Fulton County, Georgia; subpoenaed records from a partisan audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona; and has questioned election officials in Wisconsin. FBI Director Kash Patel said in April that the bureau would “soon” be making arrests in connection with the 2020 election, but those have yet to materialize.

The Department of Homeland Security is also investigating potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in Michigan, Texas, and other states. The Department of Justice recently sent letters to all 50 states warning election officials could be prosecuted if they knowingly keep noncitizens on the rolls.

The administration has also launched investigations into the security of voting machines. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence last year procured voting machines from Puerto Rico and probed them for security risks. Reuters reported the resulting report found vulnerabilities, such as machines running outdated software, but did not find evidence of vote manipulation.

Some reporting suggests Trump’s speech will focus on those alleged vulnerabilities. Reuters and MS NOW have reported that Trump will present newly declassified intelligence about voting machines and attempts at foreign interference in U.S. elections. A 2021 report from the Justice and Homeland Security departments found “no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor prevented voting, changed votes, or disrupted the ability to tally votes” in the 2020 election.

A National Intelligence Council report declassified in 2021 also found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

The speech also comes exactly one week after Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the agency responsible for certifying voting machines to voluntary federal guidelines that most states rely on. Reuters subsequently reported that Trump administration officials were frustrated with the commissioners’ inaction on voting machines and had been looking for ways to circumvent the agency for months.

For now, the White House is staying tight-lipped. “As usual, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say during his speech on Thursday evening,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”

One key question is whether Trump will actually announce a new policy or action. Preparations for the 2026 midterms are already well underway, and election officials would likely not be able to implement any major new policies in time.

Even if Trump does announce a new policy, he may not have the legal authority to order it. He has already issued two executive orders attempting to overhaul U.S. election procedures, including one last year that ordered the EAC to ban voting machines that use barcodes or QR codes for counting, with limited exceptions for voters with disabilities. But courts have blocked all their major provisions on the grounds that the president does not have the authority to unilaterally change election law. Instead, the Constitution delegates election rule-making to state legislatures and Congress.

Trump has repeatedly pressured Congress to enact his preferred election policies by passing the SAVE America Act and similar legislation, but they do not have enough support in the Senate to pass. It’s possible that a goal of Trump’s speech is primarily to ratchet up that pressure. When Newsmax asked him to give a preview of the speech in an interview on Monday, Trump responded by saying, “We gotta have voter ID, we gotta have proof of citizenship” — two provisions of the SAVE America Act — “and we have to do something about the mail-in ballots, which are just corrupt, crooked, and should not be allowed.”

Even if Trump does not try to use the speech to unveil new election policies, he could still use it to undermine the 2026 elections by sowing doubt about the legitimacy of U.S. elections in general. Election experts have decried Trump’s fearmongering around elections as attempts to intimidate election officials and lay the groundwork for challenging an unfavorable result.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Trump fires all Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act

2026-07-10T19:40:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, July 10: This story has been updated with a comment from the White House.

President Donald Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration at a moment when Trump has sought to reshape federal voting rules.

The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were notified by email. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email said. It was signed by Morgan DeWitt Snow, deputy director of presidential personnel in the Executive Office of the President.

The third commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign, according to three sources within the agency. McCormick declined to comment when reached by phone. The agency’s fourth commissioner, Republican Donald Palmer, voluntarily departed the agency earlier this year to join the Heritage Foundation.

The firings leave the four-member commission with no commissioners, meaning it cannot take official action until new members are installed. They also come days after the Supreme Court granted the president power to fire leaders of independent agencies, weakening a legal framework that for decades had insulated bipartisan federal commissions from direct White House control.

The EAC was created by Congress after the 2000 election to help states improve election administration without federalizing elections.Its role is mostly supportive: distributing federal election funds, maintaining the national mail voter registration form, testing and certifying voting systems, and offering best practices and guidance to state and local election officials.

Trump cannot simply install replacement EAC commissioners on his own. Commissioners must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and no more than two can come from the same party.

A White House official defended the firings, saying, “The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted. The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so."

The official added that the administration has been working “across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse” and to strengthen election infrastructure ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The EAC did not respond to a request for comment.

A possible legal test after Supreme Court rulings

The Supreme Court issued two major removal-power decisions at the end of its term in late June. In Trump v. Slaughter, the court overturned decades of precedent and said that the president may remove leaders of independent agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, which was the subject of the case.

In a separate case involving the Federal Reserve, however, the court recognized a different rule for Fed governors, pointing to the long historical independence of central banking institutions.

Whether bipartisan election agencies fall into the first category, the second, or some yet-undefined exception remains unresolved.

“It’s an open question about the EAC and the [Federal Election Commission],” said Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA. “The question has not been tested as to whether political entities created with bipartisan balance might be subject to another exception.”

Earlier this year, Trump fired Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic commissioner on the FEC who had served for years in holdover status after her term expired. Weintraub did not sue, leaving unresolved whether the president can fire members of bipartisan election commissions at will.

If any of the fired EAC commissioners challenge their removals, the case could become the first direct test of whether the Supreme Court’s new removal-power doctrine extends to federal election agencies structured around bipartisan balance.

The Help America Vote Act, which created the EAC, says the president is supposed to consider recommendations from the Senate and House majority and minority leaders when nominating new EAC commissioners.

In practice, Hasen said, that means both parties typically work with the administration to identify nominees. But “that’s more a custom than something that’s in the statute itself.”

That means Trump could try to nominate Democrats acceptable to him, though they would still need Senate confirmation. HAVA does not appear to create a separate shortcut for temporary commissioners: Vacancies are filled “in the manner in which the original appointment was made,” meaning presidential appointment and Senate confirmation. A recess appointment could raise separate legal questions.

A bipartisan agency with no commissioners left

The EAC does not run elections or tell local officials how to run them, but the agency has long been politically contested. Congress designed it as a bipartisan commission, with no more than two members from the same party, but vacancies, partisan fights, and leadership turmoil have repeatedly limited its ability to act. Election officials and watchdogs have also criticized the agency at different points for failing to assert itself on election security, even as its responsibilities became more urgent after Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Hicks, the commission’s chair, had served on the EAC since 2014 and previously worked for Democrats on the House Administration Committee, which oversees federal election law and election administration. Hovland joined the commission in 2019 after being unanimously confirmed by the Senate and had previously served as acting chief counsel to the Senate Rules Committee and as a senior counsel on election matters.

McCormick had served on the EAC since 2014 and previously worked as a senior trial attorney in the voting section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

What happens while the EAC is frozen

The immediate practical effect is clear: The EAC cannot act.

That could stall not only routine commission business, but also any attempt by the Trump administration to use the agency to alter the federal voter registration form or voting-system standards before the 2026 midterms.The EAC also oversees the federal testing and certification program for voting systems, accrediting labs and certifying whether machines meet federal standards known as the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. Many states rely on that certification before allowing voting equipment to be purchased or used.

The EAC has been without a quorum before. For years, vacancies rendered the agency unable to perform major parts of its work, contributing to long delays in updating voting-system guidance. The agency regained stability only after the Senate confirmed new commissioners in 2019.

Now, with the 2026 election cycle underway, the agency is again frozen — this time not because commissioners resigned or terms expired, but because the president removed all of them at once.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Department of Justice warns election officials they could be criminally charged over noncitizen voters

2026-07-07T21:28:07+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, July 10: This story has been updated with a comment from the Justice Department.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent letters to election officials in several states warning that they could face criminal prosecution if they knowingly leave noncitizens on their voter rolls or allow noncitizens to receive, cast, or have ballots counted in federal elections.

The letters are the latest example of the Trump administration exercising unusual scrutiny over the way states run elections. At the same time, they are unlikely to have an immediate practical effect, as every state already has rules and procedures to prevent noncitizen voting.

A July 7 letter to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, obtained by Votebeat, says federal law requires state and local election officials to maintain election records and take steps to ensure that only eligible U.S. citizens vote in federal elections. Signed by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, the letter gives Michigan five days to explain how it will ensure compliance with federal law at both the state and local levels.

“State election officers, including the chief election officer of the state, could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” violations of federal laws barring noncitizens from voting, the letter says. It adds that “knowingly retaining noncitizens” on Michigan’s statewide voter-registration list, sending them ballots, and counting those ballots would constitute the “procurement, casting, or tabulation” of ballots known to be false.

All 50 states received the letter, though many did not immediately realize it; in several states, the Justice Department sent the letter to the generic email addresses listed on agency websites for use by the public.

“I had to go look for it,” said one state election official, who asked not to be named.

Kiersten Pels, a spokesperson for the Justice Department, said the letters sought “voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections.” She confirmed all 50 states received the letter.

None of the state election officials contacted by Votebeat expressed concern over the letter.

Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said the office “has led the nation in keeping American elections for American citizens only” through citizenship audits and securing improvements to the federal database to check citizenship implemented under Secretary Brad Raffensperger.

Other states also defended their handling of voter eligibility checks.

“Arizona election officials have always worked to ensure that only eligible citizens are registered to vote, and we will continue following Arizona law—not directions that come from political rhetoric or intimidation,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in a statement.

Michigan secretary of state spokesperson Angela Benander said the office has been “open and transparent about our work to ensure only eligible citizens can register and vote in Michigan” and that the Department of Justice was aware of Michigan’s processes.

“While all this information is either in the DOJ’s possession or easy reach, we will be happy to provide it again to help address any confusion,” she said.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said election officials are unlikely to be intimidated by the warnings, but responding to repeated federal demands is draining time and attention from their work.

“It’s not a threat to the public servants who run elections, but it is exhausting,” he said.

Letters follow failed attempts to advance Trump voting agenda in court

According to Becker, the letters look less like the beginning of a criminal investigation and more like an attempt to pressure election officials.

“If you really thought they committed a crime, you wouldn’t be sending them a letter,” Becker said. “You’d be bringing criminal indictments.”

Becker pointed to the Justice Department’s recent losses in voting-related cases as evidence that the department’s strategy has been more aggressive than successful. Key parts of President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting were recently blocked in court, and the Justice Department has yet to win a single lawsuit it has brought seeking access to state voter rolls.

Becker said that track record makes the letters look like “a last-ditch attempt” to intimidate election officials.

“It’s just sad,” he said.

Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, said the letters fit the administration’s pattern of sowing doubt in U.S. elections by raising the specter of noncitizen voting.

“This is in line with the Trump administration’s efforts to push the myth of mass noncitizen voting and to threaten and intimidate state and local election officials,” Hasen said. “They will try every lever and threat to keep this issue in the news.”

Justice Department says it wants to help states comply

The letter was accompanied by a four-page memo outlining election officials’ obligations under the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, and Help America Vote Act, including requirements to preserve election records, maintain accurate voter rolls, and verify certain information on voter-registration applications.

The memo, the letter says, is meant to outline “various responsibilities for state and local election officials under federal law and the potential criminal penalties for those who fail to carry out their duties.” Dhillon also frames the letter as an offer of help, writing that the Civil Rights Division “would like to assist” Michigan in complying with federal election laws.

The warning is part of a broader Justice Department push to examine state voter rolls and root out noncitizen voting ahead of the 2026 elections. Research and election audits have found that noncitizen voting is rare, even as proof-of-citizenship voting proposals have gained traction at the federal and state levels.

But the attached memo’s guidance also underscores a tension in the administration’s approach to election security. In a cybersecurity section, the Justice Department directs election officials to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s online Cybersecurity Toolkit and Resources to Protect Elections, telling them to follow “all applicable guidelines” to protect election systems from cyberthreats.

One of the resources linked through that CISA toolkit is the Center for Internet Security’s election-security page. The page remains online, but CISA ended federal funding earlier this year for CIS-run programs that had provided no-cost cybersecurity support to election offices.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

FBI probe of Ohio voting rights group expands to include an affiliated national advocacy network

2026-06-17T20:44:16+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, June 17, 6:55 p.m.: This story has been updated with a statement from America Votes.

Federal officials have served a subpoena on one of the nation’s leading nonprofit voter outreach groups, which has financially supported the Ohio election advocacy group at the center of a deepening investigation by the Trump administration, according to a source familiar with the probe.

The FBI served the subpoena on America Votes, a Washington-based organization founded by prominent Democratic leaders that works to turn out voters nationwide, the sources said.

America Votes, which has given the Ohio Organizing Collaborative at least $500,000 in recent years, according to its tax filings, issued a statement Wednesday confirming it had received a subpoena “asking for basic records related to funding of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. We have been informed America Votes is not a target of the investigation.”

The subpoena signals a broader FBI investigation into the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a statewide nonprofit group founded in 2007 that works on voting rights efforts. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s sister organization, Ohio Organizing Campaign, said it registered nearly 160,000 Ohio voters in 2024, describing the effort as the largest independent voter registration program in the country.

Prentiss Haney, an Ohio Organizing Collaborative board member and former director of the group, said the FBI appeared to be seeking information from America Votes and other voting rights groups that worked with his organization.

“This is very far reaching,” he said. “They seem to be fishing for any- and everything related to civil rights and voting rights infrastructure.”

The FBI and Justice Department did not respond to emails seeking comment. Last week, FBI special agents searched the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s offices and questioned staff members and volunteers about potential voter registration fraud, according to Haney and others familiar with the investigation.

Haney said he did not know the full extent of the FBI investigation.

The FBI probe comes amid rising concerns ahead of the November midterm election about Trump administration efforts to question the legitimacy of voting in America. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that voter fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election. Most recently, he accused Democrats, again without evidence, of rigging results in the California primary earlier this month.

FBI agents have seized ballots from the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, Georgia, and secured election records in Maricopa County, Arizona.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, has been at the forefront of efforts among elections officials to scrutinize potential voter fraud. Last year, LaRose referred more than 1,200 cases to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, largely related to alleged unlawful voter registration of voting activity. LaRose said he found more than 1,000 noncitizens who had registered to vote, including 167 noncitizens who appeared to have voted in federal elections between 2018 and 2024.

But the figures represent allegations, not yet proven cases. Previous batches of LaRose voter-fraud referrals have produced few prosecutions: AP reported that of 621 criminal referrals sent to Ohio’s attorney general, prosecutors secured indictments against only nine people for voting as noncitizens over a decade.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare across the country and studies, audits, and court cases have found no evidence that it occurs at anything close to the scale needed to alter modern statewide or federal election outcomes except in very unusual cases.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Alleged Wisconsin fake elector accomplices plead not guilty as Trump seeks to rewrite 2020 election

2026-06-15T18:34:53+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

As three alleged planners of Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme pleaded not guilty Tuesday to eleven forgery-related criminal charges in Dane County court, the criminal charges against them are moving forward in a national legal and political landscape that looks dramatically different from the one in which they were filed.

When Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed the charges in June 2024, Joe Biden was president, Donald Trump was battling a criminal case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and state prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada were bringing criminal cases tied to the fake elector scheme.

That scheme arose in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump allies tried to keep him in power despite his loss. Those allies, who became known as fake or false electors, attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump in multiple states he lost and submit those certificates to Congress.

Now, as the three defendants in the Wisconsin case await trial , the case enters what is expected to be a lengthy legal process. It will unfold as Trump has regained the presidency, and he and his allies are undertaking extensive efforts to rewrite what happened in the 2020 election.

Since returning to office, Trump has issued a federal pardon to those involved in the 2020 scheme, and his administration has sent the FBI to investigate the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

The federal criminal case against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has been dismissed. And, until recently, his administration had plans to allocate $1.8 billion to compensate people it claimed had been unfairly prosecuted by the federal government, raising questions about whether participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and those involved in the fake elector schemes could receive taxpayer funds.

Other state cases have also faltered. Georgia’s election interference case has been dismissed, though not before the prosecution secured some guilty pleas from Trump’s allies. Michigan’s false elector case has also been dismissed. Arizona’s remains unresolved after a major setback for the prosecution, and Nevada’s just resumed after its Supreme Court revived charges that a lower court had thrown out.

Kaul faced criticism for filing his charges so late — it was the last criminal case to be filed regarding the fake electors. But two years later, that timing has left Wisconsin’s as one of the last cases standing in the broader, mostly failed effort to prosecute Trump and his allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

“The direction of activity has completely flipped, from prosecuting the people who were disrupting the election or inhibiting the normal flow of events to now going after Trump’s adversaries,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor who founded the Elections Research Center.

The Trump administration’s new investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Burden said, “seems to be a targeted effort at people who were mostly upholding the law and trying to administer an election in a very difficult environment.”

Amid the federal government’s current activity, and nearly six years removed from the 2020 election, Burden said any guilty finding in the Wisconsin fake elector case would likely have a muted effect.

“If we wanted the public to believe that there were ramifications for that kind of unlawful behavior, it would have to happen quickly and publicly, and feel like it was an immediate response to what people had done after the 2020 election,” he said. “But that’s not where we are six years later.”

‘Shocking’ if there are no ramifications in Wisconsin

The Wisconsin criminal case is still in its preliminary stages. Although it was filed two years ago, a number of motions and an appeal have set the case back significantly.

The defendants — former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s Wisconsin campaign attorney in 2020; attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who advised Trump on legal matters; and former Trump aide Mike Roman — each face 11 felony charges for his part in allegedly guiding Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors to send documents to the U.S. Capitol falsely stating that Trump had won Wisconsin in the 2020 election.

All entered not-guilty pleas on Tuesday during a brief proceeding attended by a couple dozen people in attendance in the several pews in the back of the courtroom.

Chesebro and Roman appeared virtually. Troupis, who briefly worked in the same courthouse where he was arraigned, was there in-person. He showed little emotion during the quick arraignment but smiled as he greeted supporters afterward. He told the press after the proceeding that he didn’t have anything to say.

The 10 false electors from 2020 aren’t defendants in the current case, but they separately settled a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin by acknowledging that Biden won the 2020 election and pledging not to violate election laws in the future.

Chesebro and Troupis separately reached a settlement in that case, turning over a trove of documents outlining their role in 2020 and agreeing not to participate in similar schemes in future elections.

Text messages and emails show that Chesebro was a primary architect behind the 2020 plan to have Wisconsin’s GOP electors attest that Trump won the state while Trump’s court challenges seeking to overturn the election were still ongoing. Troupis discussed that plan with the Trump campaign, and Roman helped craft the language of the documents Republicans planned to send to the Capitol from states that Biden won.

Troupis has since asked the federal government to reimburse him $3.2 million from the proposed $1.8 billion fund, saying his life has been a “nightmare” since he stepped up to represent Trump.

“My experience is a poster-child for what weaponization can do,” he wrote in a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, adding that “the entire legal system is at risk if compensation is not paid.”

Attorneys for Chesebro and Roman didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Troupis’ attorney declined to comment.

Burden said it is striking that the case is still ongoing nearly six years after the election, but he said the conduct at issue remains extraordinary.

“These were among the most serious challenges to elections we’ve seen in modern times,” Burden said.

“To think that there might be no ramifications of that really would be shocking,” he said, “and, I think, at odds with how the American criminal justice system has typically operated.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

The Trump administration’s multiple investigations of the 2020 election may have more to do with 2026

2026-06-08T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.

President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews, and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.

That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.

Around the same time Bolter says he talked to the FBI, two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted, according to the former poll worker, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

During the interview, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.

While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.

The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinized

In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state.

As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.

The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration. Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard, who will step down at end of this month as director of national intelligence, personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to the FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.

The Trump administration investigations stretch from Arizona, where federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, to Puerto Rico, where the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine for potential security risks.

The administration’s investigations aren’t entirely limited to 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter in April to Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election, which Trump won. But even in that case, to support the request, the Justice Department cited accusations of fraud made after the 2020 election, including a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed after a judge wrote that “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Wayne County never handed over the ballots, because it doesn’t have possession of them.

What do the 2020 elections mean for 2026?

The FBI faces challenges in pursuing cases tied to the 2020 election since the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most of the likely charges expired last year. Law enforcement veterans said it is possible that the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case, but the prospect remains unclear.

FBI Director Kash Patel suggested in April that the Justice Department would soon announce arrests related to the 2020 election, but that has not yet occurred. Officials with the FBI and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention.

“They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Injecting federal law enforcement officials into an ongoing election is a more extreme and serious action than investigating a past one, and it could face stiffer opposition. But it’s clear, at least, that the administration is scrutinizing current elections closely.

Trump last week blasted California’s long vote counting process in its primary election and asserted that Democrats were trying to steal the election and federal authorities were investigating. Last month, Trump also said he was ordering the Justice Department to investigate an error that led to some voters in Maryland receiving ballots for the wrong party in the state’s upcoming primary. State officials in both cases have explained the true causes of the issues and that nothing nefarious was behind them.

Any effort to seize ballots in an ongoing election would create unprecedented new issues, such as a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots, that could prevent election officials from declaring a winner and throw results into uncertainty.

Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote, which has promoted debunked theories about the 2020 election, said she understands Trump’s intentions but believes the 2020 election questions should have been resolved “in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.”

“This is not necessarily the way I would have recommended that it would be handled,” she said. “The fact that it wasn’t addressed has left this lingering void.”

In most cases, however, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were addressed in the wake of the 2020 election. Time and again, courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded that there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.

Engelbrecht said she views the Trump administration’s ongoing investigations as an effort to dig into long-standing concerns about the voting process it wants to address for future elections.

“The past is prologue,” she said. “If we don’t understand what happened, we are doomed to repeat it.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

The FBI is contacting Wisconsin election officials. Here’s what we know.

2026-05-15T18:50:27+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

The federal government’s probe into the 2020 election has reached Wisconsin, with several current and former election officials, including multiple people in Milwaukee, confirming they have been interviewed or approached by the FBI.

The exact nature of the investigation remains unclear, though it appears to be at least somewhat centered around the 2020 election. The agency’s election investigations elsewhere in the country have featured subpoenas for ballots and other election records, but legal experts still say it won’t be easy for the federal government to convince a court to give it access to ballots.

Milwaukee County officials are nonetheless preparing for that possibility, in part because they still retain ballots from the 2020 election, though they declined to discuss those preparations or comment on the record. Those ballots contain identifying information that could, in some cases, allow otherwise unidentifiable absentee ballots to be matched to the voters who cast them. Milwaukee is one of the few jurisdictions in Wisconsin that still has ballots from that election, and the city has long been a target of voter-fraud accusations and related attacks from the political right.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin — in communities whose elections have faced less scrutiny and in the vast majority of municipalities where 2020 ballots were destroyed according to the standard retention schedules in state law — election officials are less alarmed and are instead focused on preparing for the midterm elections.

Still, news of the FBI interest has created confusion and some fear on the part of voters and election officials.

What happened?

So far, the FBI has contacted multiple current and former election officials in Wisconsin.

The FBI interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe within the last few weeks. The news of the interview was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The interview focused on the 2020 election, with agents asking Kehoe to explain how Wisconsin elections operate.

The agency has also attempted to contact Milwaukee County Election Director Michelle Hawley. An agent left a business card at Hawley’s home when she was not there. Milwaukee County Clerk George Christensen criticized the agency for approaching Hawley at her home rather than through the county.

“While we cooperate with all legitimate law enforcement actions, we will defend against any attack on our democracy and will defend the rights of voters of Milwaukee County,” Christensen said in a statement.

Agents also left a card for, called, and texted a former Milwaukee election official, who confirmed the contact to Votebeat but requested anonymity because of personal safety concerns. That official declined to say whether they responded to the FBI.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson confirmed the FBI has reached out to city employees about the probe.

“The president for whatever reason cannot seem to let it go that he lost an election,” Johnson told a WISN 12 reporter.

Wisconsin Elections Commission spokeswoman Emilee Miklas declined to comment for this story. Other officials declined to speak on the record, and an FBI spokesperson didn’t answer Votebeat questions about the probe.

David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said the federal government’s actions appeared more to be aimed at intimidating election officials than producing actionable criminal cases.

He pointed to FBI Director Kash Patel’s public statements in April suggesting arrests related to the 2020 election were coming, as well as federal officials discussing potential cases on social media before they’re brought before courts.

“If you think you’re going to bring charges and prosecute individuals, you don’t do anything that the federal government has done over the last few months,” he said.

Becker also noted that any potential federal crimes connected to the 2020 election are “well beyond the statute of limitations for any potential federal jurisdiction or crimes,” adding, “This is a problem for any investigation relating to 2020.”

Even so, Becker said election officials’ worries were justified. He said the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which he leads, has received more requests for legal assistance from election officials than ever before “even though all of these efforts indicate that the federal government knows it’s got nothing.”

How do the events in Wisconsin relate to probes elsewhere?

It’s unclear how the FBI interviews in Wisconsin relate to the agency’s scrutiny of the 2020 election in other states.

In January the FBI raided a Fulton County, Georgia, election office seeking records tied to the 2020 election. About a month later, the agency subpoenaed records related to the audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix.

Separately, the U.S. Justice Department has sought access to 2024 ballots in Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit.

Those jurisdictions share several characteristics with Milwaukee County. All are located in highly competitive swing states won by former President Joe Biden in 2020, and all became central targets of President Donald Trump, who repeatedly challenged the election results despite court rulings, audits, and reviews repeatedly reaffirming his loss.

Fulton, Wayne, Maricopa, and Milwaukee County are the largest and most heavily scrutinized election jurisdictions in their respective states. Each has been the subject of persistent conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, many of which remain prevalent on social media, even after extensive investigations found no evidence of widespread fraud.

“What’s really disconcerting,” said former longtime Wisconsin election chief Kevin Kennedy, “is the fact that there is a clear pattern here to try and continue to stir up issues that were resolved in every single opportunity there was to review them, whether it was a court case, an independent audit or the actual certification and review process that exists.”

What comes next?

The short answer is that nobody really knows.

Officials have been considering the possibility that the federal government may seize the city’s 2020 ballots, which contain personally identifiable information.

Kennedy said recent actions by the Trump administration offer “no reason to think that information that should be protected is going to be protected.”

Kennedy said Wisconsin’s decentralized election system was intentionally designed to distribute authority among local jurisdictions — both to keep election administration accountable at the community level and to limit the amount of sensitive voter information concentrated in any one place.

“You put that at the national level,” he said, “and it only takes one bad actor — and we’ve got evidence there’s more than one of those already in the federal government — to totally disrupt the process when you consolidate that kind of information that’s protected through the various state and local laws and practices.”

Becker said it will be an uphill battle for the federal government to successfully obtain Milwaukee’s ballots. But he said the mere possibility that federal officials could theoretically identify how individual people voted is deeply troubling.

“That is not the way a democratic society works,” he said. “Now, I don’t think they’re likely going to be able to do that. I think that’s going to be incredibly difficult. It’s not impossible, but the fact that they seem to engender this fear is troubling enough.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Wayne County tells Department of Justice it doesn’t have requested ballots

2026-05-05T21:59:59+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Wayne County has responded to the U.S. Department of Justice’s demand for records from the 2024 election by explaining that the county does not have the ballots, receipts, and envelopes the DOJ is looking for.

But local clerks expect this will not be the end of the Trump administration’s interest in the strongly Democratic county.

In a letter dated April 27, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett wrote to Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon that the county “is not the legal custodian of any records responsive to your request.”

In Michigan, it is municipal clerks who do most of the work of administering elections. Thus, Garrett explained, election records such as ballots are maintained by cities and townships, not the county. Garrett also wrote that Michigan law doesn’t give the county any power to compel municipal clerks to hand over the records.

“Accordingly, any further inquiries regarding ballot materials should be directed to the city and township clerks of the records you seek,” Garrett wrote.

The DOJ doesn’t appear to have contacted any cities or townships as of yet. Michael Siegrist, the clerk of Canton Township and president of the Association of Wayne County Clerks, told Votebeat on Tuesday that he was unaware of any Wayne County municipality receiving a request for their 2024 ballots.

He has had conversations with other communities, though, about what the response will be if the request does come.

“At this point, we’re preparing for the 2026 election,” he said. “The legitimate requests we get, we’re going to honor, with regards to what our legal duty is under federal and state law.”

The Association of Wayne County Clerks, which represents the county’s 43 city and township clerks, also put out a statement on Tuesday criticizing the DOJ’s county-level inquiry and defending Michigan’s election system.

The DOJ’s letter to Wayne County “reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how elections are administered in Michigan,” the statement said. “Effective oversight or inquiry begins with an accurate understanding of that structure.”

The DOJ’s letter to Wayne County is just one example of the Trump administration taking an unusual interest in past elections in key swing states. In January, the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, a major Democratic stronghold where the DOJ also recently demanded the names of all poll workers from the 2020 election. In March, the FBI subpoenaed records from a partisan review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona.

It’s not clear what the administration’s next move in Michigan will be. The DOJ has not responded to multiple requests for comment from Votebeat, but on April 23 — before Wayne County’s response — Dhillon went on Newsmax and said officials “intend to get these records.”

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly named Detroit as one of the places whose election conduct he is most suspicious of.

In its original letter to Wayne County, the DOJ cited three cases from 2020 in which Wayne County voters were accused of fraud. It also cited a 2020 lawsuit that accused the county and the city of Detroit of allowing election workers to commit fraud. That suit was quickly dismissed, with a judge writing that the “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.”

Garrett wrote that she hoped the DOJ’s action against the three alleged fraudsters “deters others from such actions in the future” but pointed out that the allegations against Wayne County from the 2020 suit were not the job of the county clerk.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Trump administration demands 2024 ballots from Wayne County

2026-04-20T17:26:40+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding that Wayne County — Michigan’s most populous county and the home of Detroit — turn over all ballots, receipts, and envelopes from the 2024 election.

It’s the latest push by the Trump administration to assert federal oversight over how elections are administered in a critical swing state. It’s also the first known instance of the Justice Department demanding ballots and other materials from the 2024 election, which President Donald Trump won. It highlights the continued interest in Detroit, a city Trump has repeatedly said saw massive fraud during the 2020, though such claims have been repeatedly debunked.

But there are some key questions that remain to be answered. For one, the Justice Department is demanding the ballots from the county, which doesn’t have them. In Michigan, it is local officials — not the county — who administer elections and maintain custody of the ballots afterward.

To support the request, the Justice Department’s letter cites three cases, all from after the 2020 election, in which Wayne County voters were accused of fraud. It also cites a lawsuit from 2020 that accused Wayne County and Detroit of allowing election workers to commit fraud by counting ballots from voters who weren’t on the rolls, instructing poll workers to backdate absentee ballots, and to process ballots that came in late. However, that suit was dismissed quickly, with a judge writing that the “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.”

The Justice Department’s letter, dated April 14 and signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, asks the records be produced “based on this history of fraud convictions and other allegations concerning the election procedures in Wayne County.” None of the examples given were from 2024, the election being probed.

The letter instructed the county to produce the records within 14 days, and said if it does not, the administration could seek a court order for them.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment, and a spokesperson for Wayne County declined to comment Monday morning. But Michigan officials — including the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, all Democrats — released both the letter from the DOJ and statements of their own.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called the Justice Department demand a “poorly disguised attempt to justify more doubt and misinformation about our elections.” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who ran both the 2020 and 2024 elections as the state’s top election official, called it “the Trump administration’s latest attempt to interfere in our elections.”

Attorney General Dana Nessel sent her own letter back to Dhillon, saying that “Michigan stands ready to defend against these claims and any attempt to interfere in Michigan’s elections.” People have analyzed Michigan’s elections relentlessly, she said, including ongoing efforts from a number of conservative-leaning organizations — and “it is more than likely that any alleged errors will be based on previously debunked theories and provide no credible grounds for further questioning of Detroit’s election.”

“Even if your letter sufficiently states a demand, which it does not, the records are in possession of the 43 local clerks in Wayne County,” she wrote. “The scant and localized facts you cite do not merit a demand to all 43 jurisdictions.”

She goes on to say that clerks are preparing for future elections and don’t have the time to produce the records.

“These records could have been requested at almost any time in 2025,” she writes. “There is no reasonable explanation for your delay given the demand is not based on recent events but rather those occurring in 2020 or shortly thereafter.”

This is not the federal government’s first attempt to involve itself in Michigan’s elections. The DOJ last year asked the state for its voter roll, and when the state shared only the redacted, publicly available version, the federal government sued the state. That case is working its way through an appeal, with arguments scheduled for May. The Justice Department has so far filed similar lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia, So far, federal courts have ruled against them in five of the lawsuits, with decisions pending in the others.

Republicans in the state Legislature have signed on to a resolution asking for Michigan’s rolls to be released in full. Some Republicans also asked the Justice Department last year to provide “comprehensive oversight” of the state’s 2026 elections, although it remains unclear what such oversight might look like.

Trump, for his part, has suggested that the federal government should “nationalize” voting, naming Detroit as one of the places he would like to “take over.”

Michigan is the third state in which the DOJ has attempted to obtain records from past elections. The FBI seized hundreds of boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia — home of Atlanta — in a raid in January, and in March the FBI subpoenaed records from a partisan review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona — a major swing county that is home to Phoenix. FBI Director Kash Patel said Sunday that the DOJ was continuing to probe past elections and could soon make arrests.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Trump administration subpoenas 2020 records from Maricopa County amid push to investigate election

2026-03-20T23:50:18+00:00

Update, March 20, 5 p.m. MST: Votebeat obtained a copy of the subpoena served on Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen. The document confirms that a federal grand jury is conducting a criminal investigation, and that the FBI sought forensic images, videos, hard drives and other documents linked to the chamber’s controversial review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.

The name of the assistant U.S. attorney who requested the subpoena was redacted.

Update, March 9, 4 p.m. MST: This story has been updated to include comments from Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently subpoenaed records from the Arizona Senate related to the exhaustively reviewed 2020 election in Maricopa County, marking another move by President Donald Trump’s administration to relitigate an election that he lost.

State Senate President Warren Petersen, a Republican, announced Monday on social media that he had received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records related to the chamber’s controversial review of the county’s election results, which was conducted in 2021. That review ultimately concluded that former President Joe Biden had indeed won in the county.

The news comes several weeks after the FBI searched an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, for records tied to the 2020 election, which Trump has long insisted was stolen from him. Such allegations from Trump and his allies have consistently been rejected by courts, officials in the first Trump administration, election officials, and experts after multiple audits and reviews found Trump lost the election to Biden.

Jason Berry, a spokesperson for Maricopa County, said county supervisors had not received any subpoena related to election records from the FBI, but that they “will cooperate if that were to occur.” Spokesperson Judy Keane of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office said her agency hadn’t received a subpoena, either.

That suggests that the FBI obtained records that were largely already public, and did not receive documents from more recent elections. Most documents pertaining to the legislative audit of the 2020 election were turned over to news outlets and advocacy groups that sued for public access to them in the wake of the review, which found no evidence of substantial voter fraud during the election and slightly increased Biden’s margin of victory.

Two former county elected officials — Republicans Bill Gates and Stephen Richer — confirmed to Votebeat that the county, which is the most populous in the state and a key election battleground, didn’t hand over any election records from the 2022 or 2024 elections to the Arizona Legislature, beyond what lawmakers may have individually obtained via public records requests.

Gates, who now works as the executive director of Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory, said the only non-public materials that could have been turned over to federal officials by the state Senate are those covered by legislative or attorney-client privilege. He added that such privileges likely encompass only a small number of records.

But the records that the county turned over to lawmakers and auditors included data downloaded from hard drives used during the 2020 election. That included ballot images, which the FBI also obtained from Fulton County.

Under state law, the county treasurer must securely store physical ballots, and then destroy them two years after an election, which means Maricopa County no longer possesses the physical ballots from 2020. It’s unclear, though, how that statute applies to ballot images, which are digital records, or how it applies if the holder of such records isn’t the county treasurer.

The records turned over to the FBI may have also contained voter information. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said in a statement that his office was “working to identify legal options to secure personal voter information in the 2020 data that was shared.” He called the FBI’s subpoena an effort to “undermine the legal process,” referring to his ongoing legal battle with the U.S. Department of Justice over Arizona’s voter rolls.

Kim Quintero, a spokesperson for Petersen, did not respond to a request for comment on whether the Arizona Senate retained the ballot images and if so, whether it had handed them over to the FBI.

She declined to comment in response to an earlier request on exactly what records were sought by the FBI’s subpoena, whether all of those documents still existed and were handed over, and when the subpoena was received and fulfilled.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

State election officials project confidence after FBI search of Georgia elections office

2026-01-29T19:02:40+00:00

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The FBI’s search of a Fulton County, Georgia, election office, sent shock waves through election offices nationwide that have spent years responding to lawsuits, audits, and investigations driven by President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.

But state election officials — many of them gathered this week for a national conference — projected confidence afterward, saying their work has already withstood years of scrutiny following the 2020 election, and they have followed federal and state law.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, said election officials are “concerned” and “upset,” and believe “a certain individual is trying to intimidate us” ahead of the 2026 and 2028 elections. At the same time, he said, officials want voters to know they are running “safe, secure, and accessible elections,” with safeguards that are continually reviewed and improved.

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican and the state’s chief elections officer, said the only response to heightened scrutiny is strict adherence to the law. “We’re committed to orderly and fair elections, no matter what political party the voter belongs to,” she said. “But we live in a reality where politicians politicize stuff.”

Those comments came as the National Association of Secretaries of State met this week for its annual winter conference, with the FBI’s search in Georgia hanging over the gathering. The conference schedule shifted amid the uncertainty, with NASS officials offering late confirmation that Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard would address the group on Friday.

Tensions surfaced Thursday as speakers addressed the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive push for greater federal control over elections. Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat and former secretary of state, referenced the Fulton County search and called it a “wake-up call” for election officials.

Later, West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner, a Republican, introduced Jared Borg, a special assistant to the president and deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, noting that Borg had been asked to speak about the administration’s future plans — including the possibility of a second executive order on elections. Borg did not address that issue during his remarks and declined to comment when asked about it afterward.

The FBI on Wednesday executed a broad search warrant at a Fulton County elections office as part of a federal investigation into the handling and preservation of 2020 election records. A federal judge authorized agents to search for ballots, tabulator records, ballot images, and voter rolls, citing potential violations of federal election law.

The search came a week after Trump repeated his claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and said “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

Trump-appointed officials at the Justice Department and other agencies in 2020 said they had found no evidence of fraud swaying the outcome of the election, and allegations of it from Trump and his allies were rejected by courts, election officials, and experts after multiple audits and reviews found Trump lost the election to Joe Biden.

The raid in Fulton County, which Gabbard was present for, is the latest escalation of Trump’s efforts to use the federal government’s authority and resources to continue pursuing those allegations over elections. And it’s the most visible federal law enforcement step to date connected to Trump’s long-running claims of widespread election misconduct, raising concern among election administrators about continued scrutiny years after the election.

Last week, Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pressing the Justice Department’s demands for voter roll data amid tense discussions over immigration enforcement efforts there, prompting Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon to call it “an outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota into giving the federal government private data on millions of U.S. Citizens in violation of state and federal law.”

Election officials have openly said they are preparing for a range of scenarios including potential federal intervention in the administration of the 2026 midterm elections.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, framed the FBI action as politically motivated.

“This administration is weaponizing law enforcement across the board and in this case for the purpose of satisfying the president’s obsession with his 2020 election loss,” Fontes told Votebeat in a statement. “If Arizona is next, so be it. We’ve got nothing to hide and they’ve got nothing to prove.”

Warrant leaves key questions unanswered

The search warrant stands out for its breadth and timing: Issued more than five years after the 2020 election, it authorizes federal agents to seize nearly all of Fulton County’s election records from that contest, including ballots, tabulator tapes, ballot images, and voter rolls, rather than just materials tied to specific allegations.

The warrant cites federal records-retention and election-crime statutes, though required retention periods have long since passed, and allows government attorneys to take custody of and independently review the seized materials. Both statutes are typically subject to a five-year statute of limitations, which would have expired in 2025 for conduct related to the 2020 election.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he is not aware of any evidence that Fulton County destroyed election records before retention requirements expired and said the county appears to have preserved its ballots.

Becker said the five-year limitation has run out and leaves “no possible claim” tied to how the election was conducted.

Becker added that seizing ballots years after an election raises separate concerns, including new chain-of-custody problems that could undermine the integrity of any evidence gathered. “We have no idea what’s going to happen to those ballots once they’re seized,” he said, warning that such uncertainty could itself create evidentiary issues.

A rare federal search, in a county long targeted by Trump

Fulton County is Georgia’s most populous county, and encompasses most of Atlanta. Its unique position helps explain why federal investigators are still seeking access to physical ballots and detailed election records years after the election. The county has faced sustained litigation, audits, and public-records disputes tied to the 2020 vote, creating pressure to retain ballots and related materials long after many states stopped keeping them.

That prolonged scrutiny overlaps with Fulton County’s central role in Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in Georgia, a Republican stronghold that flipped for Biden and also elected two Democratic senators in the same election cycle. Trump and his allies repeatedly singled out the county as evidence of a stolen election, even after recounts, audits, and court rulings upheld the results, keeping local election officials under pressure long after most jurisdictions moved on.

The FBI search followed earlier attempts by the Justice Department to obtain 2020 election records through the courts. In December, the department sued Fulton County after officials declined to turn over ballots and related materials without a court order, arguing the records were sealed. The lawsuit sought access to the same categories of records later named in the search warrant, marking a shift from civil litigation to criminal process.

Fulton County did not respond to an interview request, and the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment.

States say their systems have already been tested

For election officials elsewhere, the Georgia search underscores just how atypical Fulton County’s situation has become. Many states say their 2020 election systems were examined exhaustively and are governed by clear legal timelines for record retention, making similar searches for 2020 records less likely.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said the FBI’s search in Fulton County was rooted in “unproven conspiracy theories” about the 2020 election. While election officials welcome good-faith questions, Benson said, they reject efforts “driven by conspiracy theories” and “verifiably untrue claims” to use the federal government to intimidate election workers or interfere with elections for political purposes.

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, said the agency is notifying county election officials about the situation in Georgia but is not issuing formal guidance. She said the office is preparing in case a similar situation were to arise in Arizona and is available, along with its legal staff, to assist counties with questions about record retention.

She added that Arizona no longer has 2020 ballots, because state law requires counties to destroy ballots within 24 months of an election.

Pennsylvania election officials were “not aware of similar activity taking place in Pennsylvania,” a spokesperson for the Department of State said in a statement, emphasizing that the state’s 2020 election “was free, fair, safe, and secure,” with results upheld repeatedly by state and federal courts.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.