Trump Raises Election Fraud Fears

Absentee ballot envelope with I Voted sticker on dark surface — Photo: Steve Heap / Shutterstock

President Trump is warning that America’s voting systems are riddled with foreign threats and fraud risks just weeks before midterm elections that could flip control of Congress.

Story Snapshot

Trump says election systems are open to foreign meddling, noncitizen voting, and insecure voting machines.
Federal agents are checking state voter rolls, and the homeland security chief asked the Justice Department to review a widely used voting machine.
Research groups and Reuters found noncitizen voting is extremely rare, often fewer than 100 cases among tens of millions of ballots.
Election officials from both parties say they are bracing for possible disputes, and some worry the bigger risk comes from Washington, not hackers.

Trump Flags Four Election Threats

President Trump warned in October that the country’s election systems are vulnerable to foreign meddling. Federal agents are searching state voter rolls and federal databases for noncitizens, and the homeland security secretary asked the Justice Department to examine whether a commonly used voting machine can be trusted. In July, Trump said the Department of Homeland Security had identified 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote.

Trump has called voting machines “extremely exposed to attacks” and said government officials have long known about the risk. He made the comments during a speech ahead of the midterms, adding to months of public statements questioning whether the vote can be trusted.

Federal Agents Expand Voter Roll Checks

Federal agents have seized ballots in some cases and examined voting machines directly. The Justice Department is fighting several states in court over access to individual voter information and recently threatened to prosecute California election officials if they knowingly count certain mail ballots. Trump has also claimed mail ballots could be forged and machines hacked, echoing arguments from his 2020 loss.

Fraud Data Tell a Different Story

State investigations have found almost no cases of noncitizen voting, and the ones that do turn up are usually clerical mistakes, according to the Brennan Center. A survey covering 23.5 million ballots across 42 jurisdictions found just 30 suspected noncitizen votes, a rate of roughly 0.0001 percent. Louisiana reviewed four decades of records and found only 79 potential cases among an estimated 74 million ballots cast.

Voting machines are never connected to the internet and go through strict testing before and after Election Day, according to election security researchers. Top intelligence officials from both parties say recent assessments show no sign that foreign actors altered voting machinery or vote counts, and lawmakers have already “war-gamed” how to respond if Trump alleges interference after the election.

Officials Brace for a Contested Outcome

Reuters reported growing alarm among state and local election officials that the bigger threat to November’s vote may come from the federal government itself, as the administration pushes to expand its role in how elections are run and verified. Officials from both parties say isolated noncitizen voting does happen, but at a scale too small to change any outcome.

The clash leaves voters on both sides watching the same pattern that has defined much of the last decade: real security questions mixed with unproven claims, while trust in both the ballot box and the officials overseeing it keeps eroding. Whether Congress flips in November, the bigger fight may be over whether Americans accept the result at all.