The Trump administration's push for access to state voter rolls has lost 11 straight cases in federal district court, according to court records cited by CBS News, even as President Trump revived unsubstantiated 2020 election-fraud claims in a primetime address Thursday evening.
The losing streak, disclosed by CBS News in its coverage of the speech, has left the Justice Department without a single district-court win in dozens of state suits for voter records. The White House's headline noncitizen figure also runs orders of magnitude above any state audit yet produced.
The 250,000 figure
Trump on Thursday pointed to a Department of Homeland Security review that identified more than 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada. The BBC put the administration's aggregate figure at 278,000. State-level audits have produced far smaller numbers: Georgia found 20 noncitizens on rolls of 8.2 million in 2024, Ohio identified 597 out of more than 8 million and 138 who cast ballots, Texas found 2,724 "potential non-citizens" among more than 18 million voters, and Louisiana turned up 390 out of just under 3 million, CBS News reported.
David Becker, executive director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told CBS News the DHS review relied on commercial data that "cannot be used" and would create "a ton of false positives." Becker said the data likely includes eligible voters and that states could break the law by removing them from the rolls.
The Brennan Center number
The Brennan Center for Justice examined 42 jurisdictions in which 23.5 million people voted in 2016 and found 30 instances of suspected noncitizen voting, CBS reported. Noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal and documented cases are rare.
The China claim
Trump alleged Thursday that the Chinese government acquired 220 million U.S. voter registration files from 2020 to 2023, calling it "the largest compromise of election data in history." Much voter-registration data is publicly available. A 2021 U.S. National Intelligence Council assessment concluded with "high confidence" that China did not deploy interference efforts in the 2020 race, the BBC reported. China's foreign ministry called the fresh allegations "entirely fabricated."
Administration line
Trump released hundreds of pages of declassified documents alongside the speech. A White House official acknowledged in a pre-speech briefing that none of the newly released material alleged that any votes were switched or voting machines hacked, CBS News reported. Neither CBS nor the BBC recorded a further administration statement defending the 250,000 figure against the audit numbers by Friday, and the two sources drawn on here are center and lean-left wire and network reporting.
Trump's SAVE America Act, which requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and bans most mail voting, remains stalled in the Senate. The midterms are three months away.