Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that undocumented migrants were allowed to vote en masse in the 2024 election have been thoroughly debunked by his own administration.
An internal review carried out by the Department of Homeland Security under Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem has found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, despite Trump and his allies’ insistence that Democrats allowed migrants to enter the country illegally so they could vote in the last presidential election.
Early results of the review, obtained by The New York Times, found that of 49.5 million voter registrations checked using the DHS’s immigration verification tool, only about 10,000 were flagged as potentially belonging to non–U.S. citizens.
Even that tiny figure, amounting to just 0.02 percent, may be overstated as DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system has also flagged U.S. citizens as possible noncitizens, among other errors.
In Charlotte County, Florida, the review initially suggested that just 15 of roughly 176,000 names on the voter rolls belonged to noncitizens. However, three people were mistakenly added to the rolls who never intended to vote, and two others had already submitted documentation showing they were naturalized U.S. citizens.
“We didn’t get a mass onslaught of people,” Charlotte County Supervisor of Elections Leah Valenti told the Times. “We have clean voter rolls.”
In St. Louis County, Missouri, about 35 percent of the roughly 690 people initially flagged by the SAVE tool were later determined to have registered at naturalization ceremonies.
Trump—who still falsely claims the 2020 election was “rigged” against him—also sought to undermine the 2024 election by repeatedly suggesting that immigrants living in the country illegally would vote against him.
The unsubstantiated claim echoes the racist “great replacement theory,” a far-right conspiracy that white Americans are purposely being replaced as the dominant race in the country in order to skew the electorate towards the Democrats.
“I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,” Trump told a crowd in Iowa in January 2024 ahead of the first-in-the-nation GOP caucus. “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”
Trump continued to push these false claims throughout his campaign, including during a live presidential debate with Kamala Harris in September 2024.
“Our elections are bad. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” Trump said. “They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”
The SAVE program was originally designed to help states verify the immigration status of people applying for government benefits. Several Democratic-led states refused to allow the Trump administration to expand its use to check voter rolls, citing privacy concerns and the risk of erroneous flags.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson claimed that more noncitizen voters would be uncovered if Democrats allowed broader data review.
“This process takes time, especially given strong opposition from blue states with notoriously bad voter roll maintenance that have refused to check their rolls” against the DHS system, Jackson told the Times.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
