ANALYSIS | How non-citizen voting could shape the midterm elections

“Shut it down.” These words from Republican Rep. John Sweeney of New York, reportedly spoken Nov. 22, 2000, outside the Stephen P. Clarke Government Center in Miami, kicked off what is now infamously known as the “Brooks Brothers riot.”

The 2000 presidential race between then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, a Republican, and then-Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, hinged on Florida and the Sunshine State’s electoral votes. The night of the election, Bush was declared the winner of Florida by a narrow margin of 537 votes.

The “Brooks Brothers riot,” named thus for the business suits and silk ties worn by the protestors, was sparked when Miami-Dade County election officials moved the location of a court-mandated recount to a location out of view of election observers and the press. Republicans alleged that the move facilitated cheating.

In the end, election officials abandoned the recount and Bush won Florida’s electoral votes and the White House — by 537 votes.

While the 1976 presidential election involved no election-place rioting of note, Democrat Jimmy Carter also won the White House by narrow margins, defeating incumbent Republican Gerald Ford, the vice president to former president Richard Nixon. Ultimately, Carter’s victory came down to Wisconsin, which he carried by a margin of 35,245 votes, and Ohio, which he won by an even narrower margin of 11,116 votes.

Perhaps the narrowest election in U.S. history came down to only two votes. In 1974, Democrat John Durkin was elected to represent New Hampshire in the U.S. Senate by a margin of 355 votes, defeating Republican Rep. Louis Wyman. The narrow margin of victory triggered the longest contested congressional election in U.S. history. The first recount declared Durkin the winner by 10 votes, and a second recount found that Wyman won by a margin of two votes.

Ultimately, the controversy worked its way to the U.S. Senate, which was unable to resolve the dispute, voting instead to declare the seat vacant. A special election was held nearly one year later, in which Durkin emerged the victor by fewer than 28,000 votes.

More recently, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks defeated Democrat Rita Hart by a mere six votes to represent Iowa’s second congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hart initially challenged the election results before withdrawing the challenge.

In 2022, Republican Lauren Boebert won her election to represent Colorado’s third congressional district by fewer than 550 votes, defeating Democrat Adam Frisch. In 2024, Democrat Adam Gray defeated Republican John Duarte in California’s 13th congressional district by only 187 votes.

A handful of votes — from no more than two to a few thousand — is enough to impact the outcome of an election to the House, the Senate, or even the White House.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed in July that the DHS has identified 250,000 non-citizens registered to vote in U.S. elections — in violation of federal law — in four surveyed states: California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada. Another 23 states cooperated with the DHS to identify another 28,000 non-citizens on voter rolls.

Chapter 18 section 611 of the U.S. Code explicitly forbids non-citizens from voting in U.S. elections:

It shall be unlawful for any alien to vote in any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing a candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, Member of the House of Representatives, Delegate from the District of Columbia, or Resident Commissioner.

The prohibition extends to all non-citizens: legal permanent residents, temporary visaholders, and illegal aliens.

“How is this a partisan issue?” Mullin asked at a July press conference announcing the DHS investigation’s findings so far. “This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. This should be that any judge and any God-fearing individual that loves this country should want to make sure that our elections are secure.”

Mullin and the DHS are working to secure U.S. elections ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms, identifying hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls. After the DHS identified 20,000 likely non-citizens in the Los Angeles area, California election officials refused to investigate further, instead fighting the DHS in federal court.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied an emergency request from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to sequester the ballots returned by the 20,000 suspected non-citizens. The DOJ had requested that the ballots be set aside until the citizenship of the registered voters could be verified.

In an Oct. 27 press conference, the DOJ confirmed that it has identified approximately 400 likely non-citizens registered to vote in the state of Washington. Many of them, the DOJ suggested, have cast ballots in elections for federal office, in violation of federal law.

“We are asking the state to set aside those ballots until we can confirm they are legal voters,” Acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington Neil Floyd said. “This is not the full number of noncitizens who have been voting in Washington. With a small sample we collected so far, I am confident we are looking at thousands of noncitizens who have been voting in Washington.”

In an Oct. 29 press release, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that it arrested 18 non-citizens for illegally voting in U.S. elections. Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the DOJ has charged more than 180 non-citizens with illegally voting in U.S. elections, according to documents and press releases reviewed by Zeale News.

In a July 16 primetime address, Trump touted preliminary DHS investigation results finding nearly 300,000 non-citizens on voter rolls in a handful of Democrat-run states, saying that the number of non-citizens on voter rolls would be more than enough to “tilt the scales” of federal elections.

“The real number is actually much higher than that,” he said of the hundreds of thousands of non-citizens identified on voter rolls. “Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible.”

He added that evidence of widespread voter fraud has been “buried” by Democrats and mainstream media.

“Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls. And yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail,” he said.

In a video posted to X earlier this year, Vice President JD Vance reiterated the President’s point.

“We don’t want illegal aliens to vote in our elections. Whenever I bring this up, you’ll have some Democrat on TV who will say, well, we don’t have to worry about that because illegal immigrants voting in our elections is very rare,” he said. “Well, number one, how about we put it to zero, okay? Even if you’re right. Number two, you’re not right. It happens way more often than a lot of people appreciate.”

One of the most vocal proponents of enforcing federal law and keeping non-citizens from voting is White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

“It’s not only that the West has had decades of open migration but that it has extended the full voting franchise to migrants. This allows political parties to import their own voters and redistribute the resources of the existing populace,” Miller said in a March X post.

If only a few thousand votes are enough to dictate the outcome of a presidential election, more than 250,000 illicit votes are enough to sway control of the House and Senate in the Nov. 3 midterm elections.