One of Donald Trump’s top prosecutorial attack dogs is threatening serious legal consequences for any official who participates in certain electoral violations that are vanishingly rare.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote to election officials across the country on Tuesday to remind them that allowing noncitizens to vote is illegal, CBS News reports.
“Any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state’s [voter registration list] or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability,” her letter reads.
Cases of noncitizens voting in federal elections are exceedingly rare. A Brennan Center study of the 2016 election put the suspected rate at about 0.0001 percent. The pro-Trump Heritage Foundation has identified just 68 instances across the more than 1 billion votes cast over the past 40 years.
The probability of electoral officers “knowingly” facilitating these statistically insignificant violations likely registers even lower. Those odds are still not as low as the chances of noncitizen votes meaningfully swaying any federal race in November’s midterm elections—which would just fall short of impossible.
Reality has not kept Trump from making the phantom threat a centerpiece of his second term. He has backed measures to require every would-be voter to produce documentary proof of citizenship simply to register. The SAVE America Act bill scraped through the House in February on a near-party-line 218–213 vote, then died in the Senate on June 4, when four Republicans joined every Democrat to deny it the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. Trump has vowed to sign no other legislation until it passes.
The president blamed Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win in key states on tens of thousands of noncitizen votes. Trump has only escalated those claims in his second term. In February, without explaining exactly how, he called for Washington to “nationalize” the country’s elections, claiming immigrants “were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally.” Trump has further urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act because cheating is “rampant in our elections. It’s rampant.”
Dhillon—who, like her boss, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is a former personal lawyer for the president—has her own history of madcap vote claims. She mounted an insurgent bid in 2023 to wrest the Republican National Committee chairmanship from incumbent Ronna McDaniel, marking the first competitive race for the post since 2011.
It turned vicious. Dhillon accused McDaniel’s camp of buying votes and dangling perks and legal-bill payouts, only to lose the first ballot 111 to 51.
Trump handed her the leadership of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division two years later, which she’s since used to level fraud allegations at election officials across the country in much the same way she once accused her own party of rigging its internal vote.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Justice Department for comment on this story.
