Voting rights, voter intimidation and the politics of voting have been central themes of TPM reporting going back more than 25 years. Over a quarter century you develop a lot of institutional knowledge. Today we’re seeing some of the most egregious journalistic negligence, sloppiness and ignorance helping propel forward the Trump White House’s assault on the integrity of the 2026 midterms. The piece I want to point you to this evening is Politico’s claim that DHS found “thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls in California and three other states.”
This claim is almost certainly false for reasons I’ll explain. I want to briefly summarize the multiple levels of journalistic negligence in Politico’s reporting.
Versions of this claim have been made repeatedly by various right-wing groups and sometimes government agencies. In every case the original claims fall apart on closer scrutiny. In most cases they involve crudely cross-referenced databases in which similar names lead to misidentified individuals, or former non-citizens are listed on old databases who have subsequently been naturalized. In some cases, it’s sloppiness. In other cases, it’s malicious disregard designed to generate false claims.
The key point is that there’s a long history of these claims and an equally long history of these claims falling apart in the face of the most basic scrutiny. Indeed, there have been repeated instances of detailed audits in red states, run by marquee Republican elected officials, who haven’t been able to come up with more than a handful of non-citizens on voting rolls. It’s even more rare that any of them actually vote. (That’s important because there are various ways non-citizens can end up on voter rolls through things like motor voter auto-enrollment. And being on a voter roll doesn’t mean anyone actually voted.) If you know anything about this topic you know these claims always fall apart.
The Politico article notes that this is what DHS says. They don’t independently vouch for the claim. But I was surprised that they made no note of the history I explain above. Indeed, they don’t make the most cursory effort to examine the evidence. Indeed, the DHS claim of hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls is based on the claim being made in “a draft press release viewed Thursday by POLITICO.”
In other words, DHS managed to get these headlines simply by stating the claim in a press release they didn’t even release! A press non-release, you might say.
In addition to all of this it’s fair to say that the Trump DHS and the Trump White House has a record of false claims on this topic. So on top of all I’ve noted above it’s not like you have a source that has credibility on this question.
This seems sloppy, negligent and more than a little sleazy, even for Politico. So I checked out the bios of the two bylined reporters, John Sakellariadis and Maggie Miller. Based on their bios, neither has any reporting background in voting rights, voting security or any of the complicated and fetid politics of voting mechanics. They both specialize in cybersecurity reporting and secondarily intelligence reporting. Those are important topics of course. But having zero background on the issue in question is how you end up with this kind of egregiously negligent reporting.
