Either this administration is profoundly inept at investigating instances of noncitizens voting, or real-life examples of such illegality are simply not all that common. 

An initial eye-watering claim that more than 15,000 noncitizens were potentially registered to vote in Nevada has since been revised downward by the Trump administration to fewer than 200 potential cases. 

Even by government standards, that's one hell of a "revision." 

Making matters worse is that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refuses to share its methodology for arriving at its new number of 185 potential noncitizen voters — leaving local authorities incapable of fully investigating such claims. 

So far, based on the limited information DHS has shared, Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) says all the supposed voters identified by the administration are, actually, likely citizens. However, he also cautioned that it's impossible to know for sure without more information from the Trump administration.  

In other words, DHS has dramatically reduced its estimate of how many noncitizens are ostensibly registered to vote in Nevada to a slightly more believable number, but it still refuses to make it possible for anyone to double-check its arithmetic.  

That doesn't exactly instill a ton of confidence that the administration's ongoing claims of widespread voter fraud are grounded in concrete, irrefutable, evidence-based facts — or that it has even remotely enough hard evidence to take any of those 185 potential cases to court. 

And Nevada isn't the only state facing seemingly made-up claims by DHS about noncitizens voting. Even states with Republican election officials have found themselves in similar situations, with the administration making huge claims about noncitizens casting ballots while simultaneously making it impossible for local authorities to seriously investigate such presumed instances. 

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), for example, was already aggressively looking for noncitizens on the voter rolls, even before President Donald Trump returned to office. He found such instances to be exceedingly rare, with fewer than a dozen such examples in his state. 

Nonetheless, the Trump administration has since alleged it has evidence of more than 400 noncitizens who potentially voted in Georgia's 2020 presidential election — a number so much larger than what local audits showed, that Raffensperger immediately requested more detailed information so he could "detect the alleged 400 noncitizens who would have voted in Georgia in 2020."

Similarly to Nevada's election scenario, however, details about how DHS arrived at such headline-grabbing numbers were never given to him. 

Part of the problem — aside from the Trump administration being filled to the brim with sycophants willing to perpetuate one man's delusions of widespread election fraud — is that the administration appears to be manufacturing such numbers by matching U.S. Census Bureau data to voter lists. It's a process that experts say is rife for mismatches because it lacks the sort of personally identifiable information needed to make sure individuals on either list are, indeed, the same person. 

Any number of anomalies, including the mere presence of two similarly named humans in the same state, could result in a voter erroneously being flagged as a noncitizen under such a process — which is likely why actual criminal cases on the local or federal level have been extremely rare, despite the attention-grabbing headlines about huge numbers of supposed noncitizens on our voter rolls. 

Between January 2025 and May 2026, for example, a ProPublica analysis showed fewer than 150 instances of noncitizens being referred for prosecution under this administration — with only 41 cases actually resulting in criminal charges. 

Compared to the tens of thousands of "potential" cases DHS has ostensibly identified, that is an anemic prosecutorial outcome. After all, one would think this administration, of all administrations, would be chomping at the bit to bring forward criminal cases as quickly as possible if it had any real degree of confidence that 185 noncitizens were ready to cast ballots in Nevada — let alone the 16,000 it originally claimed were clogging up our voter lists. 

Instead, however, this administration is not only declining to pursue federal criminal charges against huge swaths of supposedly illegal voters, but it is also denying local officials the information needed to do it on the local level. How, exactly, can one explain such decidedly lackluster prosecutorial actions, given the administration's highly charged rhetoric on the issue?

Well, the most obvious explanation is that, despite DHS's public remarks, noncitizens mucking around in our elections is actually a tremendously rare phenomenon — a possibility that countless studies and state audits seem to back up.

Of course, none of this is to say there aren't some isolated instances of noncitizens ending up on the voter rolls or even casting actual ballots. But the question isn't whether or not some noncitizens occasionally end up (inappropriately) receiving a ballot. Instead, the question is whether or not such instances are happening with enough frequency to merit the sort of federal intervention this administration is attempting to impose upon our state-run electoral process?

And the simple, objective, answer is no.

Even by the administration's own estimates — estimates that, as we have seen, are subject to wild revisions — the number of potential noncitizen voters amounts to little more than a rounding error in the national vote total. 

In August, for example, the administration claimed it had evidence of 24,000 noncitizens voting in the 2020 election. If true, that would equal less than 0.02 percent of all potential votes cast in that election — hardly the sort of large-scale, result-altering fraud that conspiracists claim took place to keep Trump out of the White House that year. 

Certainly, any noncitizen inappropriately casting a ballot should be investigated and, if appropriate, prosecuted — but it seems telling that this administration has only been able to find 41 such examples clear-cut enough to bring forward actual criminal charges, despite an endless cavalcade of headlines claiming DHS is uncovering hundreds or even thousands of such cases in countless states. 

Even in states that have been working hand-in-hand with the administration to root out noncitizen voters, the results have exposed just how rare such "fraud" actually is. For example, out of roughly 1,000 voters in Ohio suspected by local and federal authorities of potentially being noncitizens, only two cases have been referred for prosecution, according to ProPublica's analysis. 

Clearly, whatever methodology is being used to generate DHS's initial numbers simply isn't in line with what's actually happening in reality — nor do its initial estimates have any degree of actionable evidence to back up the claims being made by the administration. 

But hell, that's probably the point. As Aguilar said in a statement to NPR, "These kinds of claims, without fully explaining how they came to these determinations, just cause chaos and fear ahead of a critical midterm election."

Given how few prosecutable cases have been uncovered by this administration, it would seem that such chaos and fear aren't accidental by-products of some honest (albeit inept) effort to root out a serious threat to American democracy. Instead, such fear is the main objective — a deliberate attempt to undermine confidence in American elections by haphazardly making unsubstantiated claims about swaths of illegal voters, despite no hard evidence to back up such allegations.  

And that's a far more serious threat than anything DHS has supposedly uncovered from amateurishly matching census data to state lists of registered voters. 

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas and founder of Schaus Creative LLC, an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him on Twitter @schausmichael or on Substack @creativediscourse.