Trump administration threatens to criminally prosecute Idaho election officials if noncitizens vote

The Trump administration warned Idaho’s top election official that local and state election officials could be criminally prosecuted if they don’t stop noncitizens from voting in the federal 2026 midterm elections.

The letter — which is similar to ones that the U.S. Justice Department sent to all 50 states this week — raises the stakes of the Trump administration’s push to eradicate noncitizen voting, a crime that several experts say is rare, including in Idaho.

Trump administration sues Idaho election official to force him to turn over sensitive voter data

Idaho’s top election official, Republican Secretary of State Phil McGrane, has declined to give the Justice Department access to sensitive information on Idaho’s 1 million registered voters, including partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. 

The Justice Department’s lawsuit that asks a judge to force McGrane to turn over the data is on hold. That’s at least until the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals considers the Justice Department’s appeals of cases it lost in two other Western states, Oregon and California. 

The Trump administration has sued 30 states to attempt to gain access to voter rolls, including Idaho. But as of late last month, no court had ruled in the Justice Department’s favor, States Newsroom reported. Justice Department lawyers have said the voter rolls would be shared with a Homeland Security system that can verify citizenship.

McGrane’s attorneys, through the Idaho Attorney General’s Office, requested the case against him be paused, or held on a stay. The Justice Department opposed stalling the case. U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill approved the pause on May 21. 

Justice Department’s letter doesn’t acknowledge Idaho’s efforts to purge noncitizens from voter rolls

In the seven-page letter, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division’s Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon warned McGrane that federal law “makes it a crime for ‘an election official’ in a federal election to ‘knowingly and willfully’ deprive … defraud … or attempt … to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process …”

But the letter doesn’t include context about Idaho’s recently expanded efforts to prevent noncitizens from voting — stemming from a 2024 executive order by McGrane and Gov. Brad Little, who are both elected Republicans. Idaho voters in 2024 also widely approved a constitutional amendment to clarify that noncitizens cannot vote in the state’s elections, which was already not allowed in Idaho. 

McGrane’s office declined to comment on the letter, and said it had not yet responded to the letter, which was sent Tuesday. 

But in a statement after the Justice Department sued him, McGrane said that he’s confident “in Idaho’s elections and the efforts we’ve led to ensure secure and accessible elections.”

Under second Trump administration, no Idahoans have been prosecuted yet for noncitizen voting, law professor says 

Idaho election officials have detailed to the Justice Department the state’s work to purge noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls.

In a December email, obtained through a public records request, an Idaho election official told federal officials that after verifying citizenship for all registered Idaho voters, the Secretary of State’s Office flagged about 30 possible noncitizens to be investigated. 

The number of suspected noncitizens on Idaho’s voter roll referred to prosecution got even smaller from there. Idaho State Police referred about a dozen people to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is part of the U.S. Justice Department, for possible prosecution, the state official wrote. 

It appears that none of those people flagged in Idaho’s audit have been prosecuted. 

Since Trump took office in 2025, University of Idaho law professor Benjamin Cover, who researches noncitizen voting, has found only about two dozen federal prosecution cases for noncitizen voting. None of those were in Idaho, Cover said in an interview.

“If it really was happening at a huge scale, like some have suggested — so, if there’s thousands, or 10s of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of cases of noncitizen voting, and if the Trump administration is the most aggressive administration in modern U.S. history to try to prosecute this, you’d expect to see a lot of prosecutions, right?” he said.

Cover also argues ineligible voting shouldn’t always be considered fraud. Many instances are mistakes, he wrote in an academic paper.

To him, that suggests a different problem — with different solutions.

“Some people want us to be scared about rampant voter fraud. And they suggest that the only way to do something about it is to make it a lot harder for everybody to vote, including to make it harder for us citizens to vote,” Cover said. “I think that the problem is that we have a very small, very infrequent cases of ineligible voting, and specifically noncitizen voting.”