By Andrew Goudsward and Tom Hals
WASHINGTON, Sept 23 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s administration is ramping up criminal prosecutions of noncitizens accused of voting in US elections as he presses claims of widespread election fraud ahead of the November midterms.
The US Justice Department has brought criminal charges against about 20 people this month under a law criminalizing “voting by aliens”, roughly 13% of all prosecutions brought under the statute since it was enacted three decades ago, according to a Reuters review of court records and government statements.
The investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security has mobilized hundreds of agents in all 50 states to aid what a Justice Department official described as a “tier-one priority for the attorney general and for the White House.”
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigations, said the pace of prosecutions would likely increase in the weeks leading up to the November 3 midterms, which will determine control of the US Senate and House of Representatives.
The spate of recent cases is part of a long-running attempt by the Trump administration to demonstrate that voting by non-US citizens poses a major threat to the security of elections, despite studies showing the practice is rare.
Trump and his supporters say it is part of an organized conspiracy led by Democrats who hope to retake Congress. Trump is pushing Republicans in Congress to toughen up voting requirements.
Critics of the administration allege the claims are aimed at diminishing confidence in the vote and potentially laying the groundwork to challenge election results, with polls showing Trump’s Republican Party could face significant losses in November.
The rhetoric about noncitizen voting is "little by little eroding the trust of the public,” Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, told Reuters.
Trump administration officials have pointed to the recent cases to push back against Democratic criticism.
“The folks on the other side, the opponents of the president, insist this never happens,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter told reporters on Tuesday. “When you have dozens of cases that we brought just in the last few weeks, I think that discourages and defeats their characterization.”
A Reuters review published in July found that prior to Trump’s second term, federal prosecutions for alleged noncitizen voting were extremely uncommon. Many defendants were lawful permanent residents, a trend that has continued in the recent cases.
A separate Reuters review published on Wednesday found states may have added more than 30,000 self-declared noncitizens to the nation’s voter rolls since 2000 because of software glitches and clerical errors made while processing their driver's license and state ID applications.
Cases brought by the DOJ in recent weeks allege that defendants registered to vote or cast ballots in recent elections despite knowing they were not US citizens. The recent uptick in prosecutions represents a small fraction of the tens of millions of ballots cast in federal elections.
An official with Homeland Security Investigations, the DHS unit that conducts criminal investigations, said HSI has 1,600 open investigations related to the issue.
A COORDINATED EFFORT
The Justice Department has brought charges against 32 people in the last four weeks for noncitizen voting and related offenses, according to a DOJ spokesperson.
Seven of those cases were brought by the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, where federal prosecutors received help from the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for the US Senate and a Trump ally.
In one example of the pressure to bring cases, a top DOJ official told senior prosecutors at US attorney’s offices across the country this month that prosecutors could no longer decide on their own to refuse election fraud cases, according to a source briefed on the conversation.
The deputy attorney general's office, staffed by political appointees, would have the final say if agents with the FBI or DHS felt the evidence warranted charges, the source said.
The directive unnerved some on the call given it has traditionally been career prosecutors who decide whether charges are justified in such cases, according to the source. MS NOW first reported details of the meeting.
A DOJ official said the deputy attorney general's office would not intervene in every case where prosecutors think charges are not warranted, but said department leadership would mediate disputes between prosecutors and agents.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward and Tom Hals; Additional reporting by Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and David Morgan; Editing by Ross Colvin and Daniel Wallis)
