DHS reports few non-citizen voter cases amid broader investigation effort
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The Department of Homeland Security says it has referred about 24,000 potential non-citizen voter records to its investigative arm, but officials say only a small number have led to any substantive inquiries.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit says it has received more than 24,000 leads from the SAVE database that flag individuals as possible non-U.S. citizens on voter rolls since April 2025. The agency says those leads have been forwarded for further review, although former HSI officials familiar with the effort, who spoke on condition of anonymity, describe most of the cases as false positives, such as "derived citizens" who acquired citizenship automatically through their parents.
State election officials in Pennsylvania and Connecticut reported no contact from DHS regarding voter-fraud investigations, and neither state confirmed receipt of subpoenas. According to a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data, 41 alleged non-citizen voters faced charges between January 2025 and May 2026, a tiny fraction of the more than 150 million voters in the 2024 presidential election and 112 million in the 2022 midterms.
The DHS spokesperson noted that the SAVE system, originally designed for immigration benefit determinations, has been repurposed to screen voter registration lists. The department’s current figure of identified cases is far lower than the more than 250,000 "potential" non-citizens previously cited by former officials.
"The end goal with this, as with every single thing the administration is doing, is to undermine the integrity of the upcoming elections," said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
"The administration intends to sow doubt about the integrity of the system that we know is very secure and transparent," Becker added.
The officials emphasized that, to date, very few investigations have progressed to criminal charges, and HSI has not previously been tasked with a large-scale voter-fraud sweep.