What Trump’s Intensifying Hunt for Non-Citizen Voters Is Showing
The Trump Administration has defended its methods in statements to media outlets in response to the allegations.
Justin Levitt, who served as the White House’s first senior policy advisor for democracy and voting rights under President Joe Biden, tells TIME that “what the Administration is trying is unprecedented” because states have the authority under the Constitution to run their own elections without federal interference.
“The president just doesn’t have a lot of authority flat out to intervene in the election system,” Levitt says.
States push back on the Trump Administration’s claims
In addition to fighting the Administration’s demands to access their voter rolls in court, states have also pushed back on claims federal officials have made about non-citizens registering and voting in their elections.
In a July address to the nation, Trump made sweeping claims that 278,000 non-citizens were on voting rolls in the four Democratic-led states of California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. DHS then released what it characterized as a specific breakdown of the numbers of suspected non-citizen voters in those states the following day, without providing evidence to support the figures.
