Hours before polls closed on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, the Trump administration promised that its hunt for noncitizen voters will not end with the vote count. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will comb through "voting logs" after the election to check that no noncitizen cast a ballot. "After this election we'll be gathering all the data, we'll be gathering the voting logs, and we'll be going through those and making sure that no illegals voted," Mullin said. Every figure in this story — the 300,000 flagged registrations, the 1,600 investigations, the 100-plus convictions — is the administration's own claim, reported here as a claim. None of it has been independently verified, and, as the record below shows, federal courts have spent the autumn ruling against the parallel efforts to obtain and act on state voter data.
Source: Democracy Docket, reporting Mullin's Fox News appearance (Nov. 3, 2026)
Mullin said DHS "will be looking at the registers" and at "all those that voted after the election." He framed the work as continuing regardless of tonight's results: "Even past this election, it is still DHS' job to make sure that this was an election that was handled by the federal laws, meaning that only those that were legally able to vote, voted." What he did not say is how the department would actually obtain the logs. Democracy Docket, which reported the remarks, noted that Mullin did not explain how the administration might gain access to that data, or whether it would go to the extraordinary length of seeking warrants to seize ballots or voting machines. The laws governing voter data differ from state to state: whether a person voted in an election is often a matter of public record, while sensitive identifiers such as Social Security numbers are not.
Source: Democracy Docket (Nov. 3, 2026)
The 300,000 figure — what DHS says, and what it has not shown
The voting-logs pledge is the second step of a numbers campaign Mullin has been building for months. In an interview with Newsmax released on October 30, he said the department's count of noncitizens found on voter rolls had risen past the figure he gave in July. "We can get access to the information. And that's how we found the 250,000. That number is actually pushed north of 300,000," he said. DHS is comparing state registration records against U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) records, he explained: "We can tell if they're registered to vote, if they're legally in this country or not." In the same interviews he put the enforcement tally at more than 1,600 open investigations and more than 100 convictions to date — again, the department's own figures, with no state-by-state breakdown published.
Mullin himself drew the line that matters most for reading those numbers: being flagged on a roll is not the same as having voted. The department's records, he acknowledged, typically arrive after ballots are cast, so it cannot yet say how many of the flagged individuals actually voted in this election. "I can't say that they voted or not. We're still going through that," he told Newsmax. That concession is the gap at the centre of the whole effort — between registrations the administration says should not exist, and ballots it can prove were unlawfully cast. Voting in a federal election as a noncitizen is a federal crime; that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the scale, and on scale the administration's public claims and the court-tested evidence have so far told very different stories.
Source: The Epoch Times, via The Thinking Conservative (Nov. 2, 2026)
The July letters show how the flagging works. DHS wrote to election officials in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania saying a preliminary review — matching publicly available registration records against federal immigration data — had found what could be more than 256,000 noncitizens registered across the four states: as many as 190,832 in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. A smaller set matched on name, date of birth, address and Social Security number together: 81,336 in California, 19,497 in New Jersey, 8,576 in Nevada and 8,594 in Pennsylvania. The letters described the findings as preliminary and asked the states to work with DHS on verification. One caution built into the method itself: many noncitizens — green-card holders, work-permit holders, visa holders — are legally issued Social Security numbers, so a registration record matching a noncitizen record does not by itself prove that anyone registered unlawfully, let alone voted.
Source: Fox News Digital reporting on the DHS letters to the four states
The courts have spent the autumn ruling the other way
While DHS has pressed its claims in interviews, the Justice Department has pressed them in court — and lost. The department demanded that states hand over their unredacted voter rolls for inspection; most states refused, and the administration has lost every lawsuit it has brought trying to access those files, Democracy Docket reports. In California, the government sued to force officials to set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots it said were sent to likely noncitizens; the Supreme Court dismissed that bid in a single sentence on the eve of the election. Federal judges have also ordered the administration to identify every state that received its ballot-segregation demands, and blocked the use of its noncitizen lists — rulings Awaaz Punjab has reported as they landed.
Source: Democracy Docket (Nov. 3, 2026)
Washington state shows why the lists themselves are contested. The Justice Department asked Secretary of State Steve Hobbs to set aside ballots cast by 405 people it identified as noncitizens. In an October 28 reply, Hobbs said a preliminary check showed the list "includes United States citizens and is not reliable" — and that the department had sent it as a PDF of a printed spreadsheet, without the voter identification numbers or addresses officials need to match a name to a registration. The Justice Department's own letter conceded the point in its wording: the people named "are or were noncitizens," it wrote, adding in parentheses that "they may have subsequently naturalized." In other words, some of the ballots the federal government wanted quarantined could belong to citizens with every right to vote — in a vote-by-mail state where a shelved ballot may never be counted, and its owner never told.
Source: CommsTrader, reporting the DOJ letter and Secretary Hobbs's October 28 reply
The wider evidence base is the other half of the record. Studies of American elections consistently find that voting by noncitizens is incredibly rare and has never decided the outcome of an American election, Democracy Docket notes. When CNN's Kasie Hunt pressed Mullin earlier this year with a Heritage Foundation count of just 25 prosecutions in which citizenship was an issue, he did not dispute the small number — he rejected its significance. "Twenty-five is 25 too many," he said. "One person voting illegally is one too many." Both things are on the record: the secretary's standard is zero, and the documented, prosecuted scale of the problem, so far, is measured in dozens of cases — against claims of hundreds of thousands of suspect registrations that the department says it is still working to verify.
Source: Democracy Docket (Nov. 3, 2026); Fox News summary of Mullin's CNN State of the Union exchange
The four states DHS named first — California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania — are home to some of the largest Punjabi communities in America, from the Central Valley to Edison and Jersey City. Three things are worth holding on to. First, being 'flagged' is not a finding: it means two databases matched, and the Justice Department itself accepts that naturalised citizens can appear on these lists. Second, the legal line itself is bright: only U.S. citizens may vote in federal elections, and a green-card holder who votes — even by mistake, even after being registered in error — risks criminal charges and deportation; anyone unsure of their status should not cast a ballot and should seek legal advice. Third, if you are a citizen and receive any notice questioning your registration, you can check and correct your registration status with your county or state election office. This is general information, not legal advice.
What happens next
The immediate test comes after the counting. Mullin has promised that DHS will gather the data and the voting logs once the election is over and work through them; he has not published a timeline, a list of states whose records the department believes it can compel, or the legal mechanism it will use where states refuse — and most states have refused, successfully, all autumn. Expect the fight to return to the courts: the administration's demands for rolls and its ballot-segregation letters are already the subject of litigation brought by states and by voting-rights groups, including the Washington lawsuit over the 405 names. Expect, too, the prosecutions the department counts as convictions — just over 100, by its own tally — to be followed case by case as they surface in court records. Awaaz Punjab will track both the claims and the dockets, because in this story the distance between the two has been the story all along.