The Justice Department has prosecuted, arrested or convicted more than 200 non-citizens for voting illegally or trying to register in federal elections. That number, with more cases still active, came in before a single midterm ballot is counted today.
That's one item on a list of fifteen.
Ahead of today's midterms, the Trump administration took fifteen separate actions to tighten election security, across almost every federal agency that touches voting: the Justice Department, Homeland Security, USCIS, CISA, FEMA, Health and Human Services, Education, Commerce and the Census Bureau. Every one of them is already done, with results you can measure.
Start with the voter rolls. USCIS went through publicly available voter files and identified tens of thousands of suspected foreign nationals registered to vote. President Trump made the SAVE system, the federal database that checks immigration status, available to state and local election officials for free. Since then, roughly 500,000 dead people have been removed from voter rolls nationwide, according to the administration. Half a million ghost voters are gone.
Attorney General Todd Blanche formally notified state election officials that the Justice Department would hold them accountable for breaking federal election law. He also opened an inquiry into Mark Zuckerberg's nonprofit funding of election offices, the private money that poured into local election operations in 2020, and launched an investigation into whether states shared private motor vehicle data with Democratic get-out-the-vote operations.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a one-day, military-wide voting stand-down every October in federal election years, set aside entirely for troops to register and send in their ballots. The War Department also closed loopholes that let some overseas non-residents use military voting privileges they weren't entitled to.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Medicare and Medicaid chief Dr. Mehmet Oz issued nationwide guidance protecting nursing home residents' right to vote on their own terms. Education Secretary Linda McMahon warned schools they'd lose federal funding if they shared private student data with partisan groups.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin referred voting machines that count QR codes and barcodes, instead of ballots voters can read for themselves, to the Justice Department for review. CISA, the federal cybersecurity agency, dropped its old role policing political speech online and refocused on giving states election security tools. It also published a report laying out specific weak spots in electronic voting systems and how to fix them.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's Census Bureau proposed an overhaul of the 2030 Census to properly count U.S. citizens. According to the administration's report, errors in the 2020 Census handed Democrats at least five House seats they shouldn't have had.
Then there's the money. FEMA tied more than $1 billion in Homeland Security grants to states adopting election security measures, including manual audits after elections and matching ballots to registered voters. That's a billion dollars in federal grants, and the condition is simple: prove your elections are clean.
China stole 220 million American voter files. Tens of thousands of foreign nationals sat on registration rolls. Half a million dead people were still listed as voters. Every time someone tried to fix any of it, Democrats called it voter suppression.
That's fifteen actions from eight Cabinet-level officials, and more than 200 prosecutions already filed.
The polls are open today.
