Heritage database logs 100 noncitizen voting cases from 1982 to 2025
The Minnesota indictments cap a September in which federal prosecutors have brought noncitizen-voting charges against at least 24 individuals across 10 states, The Guardian reported. In most of those cases, the individuals charged are lawful permanent residents. The 10 Minnesota defendants are all lawful permanent residents alleged to have made false claims of citizenship to vote or to have cast a ballot as a noncitizen in the 2022 or 2024 general elections and the 2026 primaries. At least three have pleaded not guilty.
At a Justice Department press conference in Washington, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters that “Elections today are often decided by a small number of votes and that’s why these investigations and prosecutions matter.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin went further, raising questions about voting-machine integrity without offering evidence. “We’ve had some trouble with some machines,” Mullin said. “Can’t say that it was fraud or not fraud.”
The Guardian reported that there is no evidence that fraudulent voting is a substantial problem, and that Trump and his allies have repeatedly made unfounded allegations while claiming the electoral process is rigged against them. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that often supports the administration’s initiatives, maintains a database of noncitizen voting that identified 100 cases from 1982 to 2025 — a figure The New York Times has calculated as 0.000008% of the 1.3 billion votes cast in presidential elections over that period. The Bipartisan Policy Center has found that 0.04% of federal citizenship verification cases are returned as noncitizen.
The Guardian reported that administration officials have sought to support Trump’s longstanding unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in US elections through investigations and indictments related to election concerns. The paper also reported that Trump has sought to undermine public confidence in US elections by promoting false claims of election fraud and making unverified claims of election insecurity, and that earlier this year, the president heightened those claims in a primetime address.
According to The Guardian, the president has also pursued new voting-rule changes described by the paper as “a crackdown on voting, ostensibly to secure elections.” The Guardian noted that experts have assured voters that elections are already secure. Those rule changes include new restrictions on mail-in ballot voting, which Trump has criticized; the creation of a federal database of eligible citizens; and a requirement that voters provide proof of citizenship when voting in federal elections. Most of those actions have been challenged in court.
A September 2026 report from the Center for Election Innovation & Research found that “sweeping allegations about possible noncitizen registration or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data,” The Guardian reported. New Jersey announced in recent months that more than 6,000 noncitizens had been falsely registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024 due to a system error; of those, fewer than 340 voted.
The Guardian has reached out to attorneys representing nine of the 10 Minnesota defendants. One defendant did not have an attorney listed on record. An attorney for Alan Barbu Kargb, a Liberian national with lawful permanent resident status charged with noncitizen voting and making false claims about citizenship to vote, declined to comment.