Trump DOJ’s voter rolls grab has unearthed a tiny number of illegitimate votes

After obtaining access to nearly half of states’ full voter rolls, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has only found “dozens” of instances of noncitizens voting illegitimately, according to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.

“For every person that we’ve seen a story about, I know of dozens and dozens more cases,” Dhillon said in an interview Tuesday night with the conservative journalist John Solomon. 

Dozens of illegitimate votes may seem significant. But 50 illegitimate votes would amount to just 0.000007 percent of the roughly 680 million votes cast in the last five national elections. And there is little question, experts say, that that number would be dwarfed by the number of legitimate voters kept from the polls by the purges, proof of citizenship requirements, and other restrictive measures that the Trump administration is backing in what it claims is an effort to address the issue.

“U.S. attorney’s offices are wanting to bring these cases, but we have, of course, interference with the very appointment of these U.S. attorneys at the political level,” Dhillon continued”So that’s above my pay grade, but it’s really frustrating that we’re being prevented from doing our job.”

Federal prosecutors can bring cases even without a confirmed U.S. attorney leading their office.

Dhillon also said DOJ’s campaign to obtain the unredacted voter rolls from every state has found “tens of thousands” of noncitizens who were registered to vote — along with hundreds of thousands of deceased residents who had yet to be removed from the voter registration system. 

Under federal voting laws, states are required to routinely cull their voter rolls of residents who are not eligible to vote, or illegally signed up to cast a ballot. Despite GOP narratives, voter fraud is extremely rare and states have numerous systems in place to continually update their voter rolls. 

Dhillon also falsely implied that states don’t work to maintain accurate voter rolls. 

“You may ask, why don’t states clean it up themselves? Well, sometimes it’s just inefficiency, but more times it’s actually states wanting to clean up their voter rolls, and the Marc Elias’ of the world and even the DOJ (under Biden) are suing them to stop them from cleaning up their own voter rolls,” she said, referencing Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias.

A majority of states used to work together to maintain accurate voter rolls through Election Registration Information Center (ERIC), which established a shared network for states to swap voter registration data. But thanks to anti-voting conspiracy theories perpetuated by President Donald Trump and his acolytes, a number of red states have since left ERIC, which has made it harder for those states to access reliable data to maintain accurate voter roles.  

“And so, you know, I don’t blame states, in a way, because it’s whiplash. You know, suddenly the federal government is saying, ‘Please do your jobs.’ A year ago, they were saying, ‘Don’t do your jobs,'” Dhillon said.