States play defense amid Trump’s latest election fraud claims

Officials in states across the country are playing defense against President Trump’s election fraud claims as he doubles down ahead of the midterms. 

In remarks to the nation last week, Trump claimed to see “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.” He cited a 2020 voter registration case in Michigan, and he swiped at California, where he suggested the state’s mail-in ballots were “floating aimlessly.” 

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ahead of the remarks also said the agency found thousands of noncitizens on voter rolls in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania. 

On Tuesday, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) confirmed that a software error affecting the state’s motor vehicle department in 2023 and 2024 led to the voter registration of about 6,600 people who indicated they were not U.S. citizens. Sherrill said she was “appalled” by the “reckless failures that allowed this to happen,” but she shrugged off Trump’s alarm as she stressed that officials were taking every step to protect election integrity.

“As the Trump Administration tries to weaponize elections for political gain, I am ensuring we protect our elections,” she said. “The difference is simple: When we find a problem, we don’t hide it, deny it, or invent conspiracies. We investigate it, we fix it, and we tell the public.”

Sherrill joins a chorus of election officials and experts in the states targeted by Trump who have hit back sharply against his accusations, defending their election systems and seeking to reassure voters just 100 days out from the high-stakes midterms. 

“The best way that we’ve seen to combat Trump’s election lies is for local election officials to explain in a clear way directly to voters what’s going on, to point out the measures that assure that elections are secure, that the processes are transparent,” said Rick Hasen, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Law School who runs the Election Law Blog. “I don’t think any of them should be caught up in all the noise.” 

The president in his speech last week said his administration declassified files about the widely debunked claim of voter registration fraud in Muskegon, Mich., from 2020, which he called a “pay, play and cheat” operation. While an investigation found some fraudulent voter registrations in the case, they were voided at the time, and no one was charged when the incident was referred to the FBI in 2021. 

“Michigan elections are safe and secure — any suggestion otherwise is designed to undermine our voters’ basic rights,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said in a statement on Trump’s remarks. 

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D), who is a candidate for governor, stressed that some 1,600 bipartisan professional election administrators and thousands of trained poll workers monitor each election, and that results are checked by dozens of audits. She bashed Trump for trying to “rehash long debunked and baseless conspiracy theories about an election he lost almost six years ago.” 

Michigan was one of several states Trump name-dropped in his much-anticipated primetime address, during which he alleged significant vulnerabilities in the country’s election system but largely failed to reveal any new evidence for his claims. He also urged Republicans to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter ID to cast a ballot. 

He pointed to primary elections last month in California, long a target of GOP criticism, panning the time it took to process mail-in ballots even after state leaders warned the tabulation could take days.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called the president’s speech the “ramblings of a mad king” while the Golden State’s top election official, Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D), sought to assure Californians that noncitizen voting “remains exceedingly rare.” 

Trump’s DHS also claimed that California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada have as many as 250,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls, though a review by The Hill found the department said only 118,000 voters had names and dates of birth that matched noncitizens on file.  

“Nevada voters deserve facts, not fear,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) said in a statement. “The President has spent the better part of a decade attempting to manufacture a crisis around voting when there is none.” 

As election officials respond, Trump’s remarks have frustrated some Republicans who want to move past the 2020 election. 

“I think it will end up being a huge distraction for Republicans who are trying to win tight races in November, and maybe no better example than here in Michigan, where we’re front and center in this latest round of allegations from the president,” David Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University, said. 

The president’s claims have also stoked Democrats’ long-standing concerns that Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork to interfere in future elections — adding fuel to enduring voter distrust in election systems. 

“He’s already undermined voter confidence in the minds of his supporters, who are more likely to believe his unsupported claims of a stolen or rigged election. But the more he does this, I think the more he convinces people on the left that he’s trying to rig the election himself,” Hasen said of Trump. “So it’s actually hurting voter confidence across the political spectrum.” 

A poll earlier this year from the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections at the University of California, San Diego found voter trust in elections has fallen significantly across party lines since 2024, with just 6 in 10 American voters expressing confidence their votes will be counted correctly in the midterms. 

Among the risks of this growing voter distrust is “that it’ll fuel a sense that elections don’t matter” and depress turnout, said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager in the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice. It could also “lead to support for actions that actually threaten either the people who run elections, or that threaten the very policies that we have in place to make sure that there are free and fair elections.”

“But, at the end of the day, elections are something that is taking place across nearly 10,000 jurisdictions across the country, and there are checks in place to make sure that eligible voters are the ones participating in counting ballots, and it is your community who is running your elections and serving your voters,” he added.

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