The Justice Department sent a letter this week threatening criminal charges against Pennsylvania’s top election officials if they allow votes by noncitizens to be counted in forthcoming elections — a largely nonexistent phenomenon that is already prohibited by law.
The letter, addressed to Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt and obtained by The Inquirer, was part of a nationwide effort by the Justice Department to say it is cracking down on what President Donald Trump has inaccurately described as a variety of problems with how ballots are cast and counted across the country. Similar letters were sent to election officials in all 50 states this week, the Justice Department said in a statement.
An agency spokesperson said the letters were “asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with [officials’] obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections.”
The outreach came after Trump’s administration, during his second term, took other steps to target states’ election practices or voter rolls.
A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement that the state “is in compliance with federal and state election law.”
“We will continue our nonpartisan work to ensure elections in the commonwealth remain free, fair, safe, and secure,” said Geoff Morrow, the department’s deputy communications director.
Last month, a federal judge in Pittsburgh dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit that sought to obtain Pennsylvania’s entire unredacted voter database. Federal judges have rejected similar efforts by the Trump administration in at least 10 other states, although the Justice Department recently filed an appeal of the decision in Pennsylvania.
The FBI, meanwhile, is reportedly assisting with a sweeping investigation into alleged irregularities in the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga. — a key jurisdiction that contributed to Trump’s loss in that year’s presidential contest.
Trump has repeatedly refused to acknowledge his defeat to Joe Biden that year, and he has long fueled evidence-free conspiracy theories about widespread and brazen fraud in elections, particularly in jurisdictions that tend to vote for his opponents. Experts generally agree that although voter fraud does happen, it has not historically occurred at rates that would tip the scales in high-profile contests.
The effort also comes as Trump has been again pressuring congressional Republicans to pass the so-called SAVE America Act, a controversial bill that could require voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering or to show approved forms of identification when voting. Prior efforts to pass the bill into law have failed amid bipartisan resistance.
As for the subject of the Justice Department’s most recent letter — which was signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon — noncitizens are already barred from voting in federal and state elections under a law passed by Congress 30 years ago.
Studies in a variety of states since then have found some instances of noncitizens being registered to vote or voting, but almost no evidence that the issue is widespread or common. In Utah, for example, officials said earlier this year that they had reviewed records of the state’s more than 2 million voters and found one person who was confirmed as a noncitizen.
And in 2024, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services wrote in a letter to Ohio’s secretary of state that “it is extremely uncommon for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections,” and that many of those who do are identified by authorities and prosecuted.
Dhillon, in her letter, acknowledged that noncitizen voting is already illegal. But she nonetheless listed several provisions under which election officials could be criminally charged if it occurred.
And she said Schmidt should reply within five days to describe “how the state of Pennsylvania intends to ensure it is complying with these federal laws,” a deadline the Pennsylvania Department of State said it intends to meet.
Schmidt, a Republican who was chosen by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro to serve as the state’s top election official, has been at the forefront of addressing noncitizen voting dating back to his time as a Philadelphia city commissioner.
In 2017, when he worked for the city, Schmidt discovered that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s so-called motor voter system, which allows eligible citizens to register to vote when they get or renew a driver’s license, had a glitch dating back to the 1990s and was allowing legal residents who were noncitizens to register to vote, too.
Schmidt found that the glitch had allowed at least 168 noncitizens in Philadelphia to register to vote. And he found that an additional 52 noncitizens in the city had registered by other means.
Collectively, that group of people cast a total of more than 225 ballots in Philadelphia during the years they were registered, Schmidt’s office reported at the time. Schmidt said it was critical to rectify the issue, and all of the improper registrations were canceled. PennDot fixed the glitch in 2017.
Still, the largest number of votes cast by noncitizens in the city during the affected time period occurred in the 2008 general election, when 47 such people submitted ballots — representing about .0065% of the city’s vote tally that year.
“One thing that became very clear through that research and all evidence suggests that noncitizens voting in elections in the United States occurs very rarely,” Schmidt told Votebeat earlier this year. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not important. Like I said before, every vote is precious, and we want to make sure that we do everything we can to safeguard and strengthen election integrity. But there’s no evidence to suggest that it happens in any widespread way whatsoever.”
Lauren Cristella, president of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that advocates for good governance, said the Justice Department’s letter “represents another attempt to undermine faith in our elections without presenting any evidence or even allegations of wrongdoing.”
The country’s elections have routinely been shown to have been conducted freely and fairly, Cristella said. And in Pennsylvania, she said, Schmidt has been “the person who’s been leading the charge to clean up our voter rolls.”
State Auditor General Tim DeFoor, a Republican, found in an audit released earlier this year that the reforms made to the motor voter system after Schmidt’s exposures of PennDot’s systemic failures had been largely successful.
The Justice Department’s effort to threaten election officials not only clouds that reality, Cristella said, but it “completely lacks integrity and is part of the distrust that is leading to the erosion of our democracy.”
