At the heart of MAGA conspiracies is misinformation about voter rolls and voter ID, relentlessly boring topics that may determine the fate of democracy.
Being on the voter roll doesn’t automatically mean a vote will be counted, or even that a ballot will be sent. , outside the L.A. elections headquarters.
“We don’t want to let anyone down, we don’t want to let anything slip away, and we’ve seen nothing. ”If only more RITOs would follow suit. But, alas, the conspiracies rage on, aided and abetted by L.A. ’s own First Assistantare a huge refrain in conspiracy theories and the subject of numerous lawsuits by Trump‘s Department of Justice.
Trump is demanding that the federal governmentto ensure ballots go only to legal voters, which is one of those scary and ill-conceived ideas that sounds reasonable on the surface.before being appointed to office, claim untold thousands of ballots are sent out erroneously, then somehow, via Democrats, land in the hands of undocumented immigrants and others who use them to vote illegally.
“It certainly is a new level of danger that the people who spent unlimited amounts of time and money trying to prove that the 2020 election was stolen are now leading and staffing the Department of Justice,” Eileen O’Connor told me. She’s a senior counsel at the “There have just been people who have spent every waking moment of their lives, practically for decades now, searching for all of this voter fraud that they claim is happening and not finding it,” O’Connor said.
“And they’re still failing to find it. ” So what’s the deal with voter rolls? Are they really the dark heart of a Democratic scam to rig elections? Or is the scam that Trump and MAGA are attempting to use the boring and bureaucratic nature of voting rolls to do the very thing they claim to be fighting — undermine of free and fair elections?
, because, well, the Constitution. But that structure is also a good idea because states keep closer track of who is a legal resident and where they are than the federal government. Those like O’Connor who care about democracy and fair elections point out federal meddling with an “audit” of these lists is vastly overstepping federal power — and likely will knock of numerous voters who have a right to cast a ballot.
Part of that is because voter rolls are “loose,” according to Chris Fowler, a professor of geography and demographics at Penn State who specializes in voting rights. Most states have laws that strive to be inclusive and are slow to remove people from the lists, precisely because we want as many people to vote as we can get. Some people in California are added when they get a driver’s license.
Some people move and ask the postal service to update their voter registration. Some people register once, move dozens of times and never think to tell their secretary of state. Some people die. Some people get married and change their name.
Some people don’t vote for 10 years, then do. You get the idea. Life happens, and updating voter registration is rarely our first thought.in which a signature gatherer was paying folks on Skid Row to register to vote. The key there being register, not actually vote.
One-off cases like this should be and are prosecuted, but the inclusive nature of the rolls is by design, not a flaw. Fowler added, though, if someone wants to make a big stink about fraud without any actual evidence, that inaccuracy is the perfect sleight of hand. To the average person, it sounds bad that we can’t keep a clean list of eligible voters.
But here’s what the conspiracy folks leave out: Being on the voter roll doesn’t automatically mean a vote will be counted or even that a ballot will be sent. It’s just the starting point of everyone whoThere are numerous safeguards, such as signature verification, that cast ballots go through before the vote is considered legitimate.
When there is doubt, the vote is “cured,” which is an unnecessarily convoluted way of saying local election officials may go as far as tracking down the actual voter and making sure they are legit. Yes, if there is a question, actual people contact an actual voter. If they can’t get in contact, the vote is usually set aside.
The MAGA demand to audit voter rolls ignores all this reality and is instead based on the false idea that voter rolls translate directly into counted votes. The game MAGA is running with voter roll audits is that it was never about election integrity.
It’s about suppressing the vote of Black people, brown people, young people and others who tend to vote Democratic and also tend to have more unsettled lives that would lead them to have inaccurate information, such as conflicting addresses, on the voter rolls.into a way to keep legal voters from casting their ballot. Call it the new Jim Crow — a disingenuous way to suppress certain votes all gussied up as safety. But the effort creates a win-win for Trump.
If his Department of Justice is successful in getting state voter rolls — which it has been in more than a dozen states that have voluntarily turned them over — they can demand as many names as they want be removed. The federal government has not said what criteria it will use to “clean” these rolls, who will be in charge, how the information will be used or kept, or how people will even know they’ve been knocked off until they try to vote.
There is even concern the information gathered from audits will be used for other purposes, such as immigration enforcement or surveillance activities.and has appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — MAGA is simply screaming that the mere fact of protecting these lists from federal interference is proof that we’re covering up this vast conspiracy.
“It is part of laying the groundwork to just be able to say either we have all these voter rolls and we’ve analyzed them and they’re full of errors, or to be able to say, ‘Oh, you didn’t hand over the voter rolls. What are you hiding? ’ O’Connor said. None of that is actually good for elections, or democracy.
That’s the real scam with voter roll audits. They are a Trumped-up attempt to make us doubt a system that is working just as designed, imperfectly and inclusively, protecting democracy while encouraging legal voters to participate. The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
The article argues that prominent conservatives who acknowledge a lack of evidence for mass voter fraud, such as Steve Hilton in Los Angeles, undercut President Trump’s narrative that Democrats “massively cheated,” aligning with research finding no evidence of widespread fraud in recent U.S. elections or in mail voting. It contends that voter rolls are being misrepresented by Trump and MAGA allies: the piece explains that rolls are administrative lists of potentially eligible voters, not records of actual ballots cast, and that numerous safeguards—such as signature verification and ballot “curing” processes—exist between being on the rolls and having a vote counted.
The article emphasizes that voter rolls are intentionally “loose” and somewhat outdated because state laws prioritize inclusivity and err on the side of leaving people on the rolls so eligible voters are not wrongly removed; this mirrors expert analyses that list maintenance inevitably produces some inaccuracies but that such imperfections do not equate to fraud. It further notes that isolated instances of registration fraud, such as paying unhoused people to sign registration forms, are already prosecuted as crimes and have not been shown to scale into systemic schemes that alter election outcomes, a point consistent with research finding illegal voting to be extremely rare.
The piece criticizes demands for sweeping federal “audits” of state voter rolls as a profound overreach into powers the Constitution reserves for states, echoing concerns from voting-rights advocates that the Department of Justice’s push for full, unredacted voter lists exceeds what federal law allows and intrudes on state control of elections. It argues that the true objective of these audits is not election integrity but voter suppression, particularly of Black, Latino, young, and other more mobile voters whose addresses and records are more likely to appear “inconsistent,” pointing to broader evidence that aggressive purge practices and flawed data-matching disproportionately remove eligible voters from these communities.
The article warns that allowing the DOJ to obtain and “clean” state voter rolls without transparent criteria, oversight, or notice to affected voters would create a mechanism for large-scale, partisan purges of lawful voters and could open the door to misuse of sensitive data for immigration enforcement, surveillance, or other political purposes, concerns echoed by civil-rights groups analyzing the current DOJ data demands. It notes that the DOJ has already sued multiple states, including California, for not turning over full statewide voter lists and has cited federal statutes to justify these demands, while critics argue that these same laws were designed to protect voting rights rather than to empower Washington to handpick voters for removal.
Finally, the article contends that even when states resist or defeat these efforts in court, the mere existence of the conflict is used by MAGA figures to claim a “cover-up,” thereby seeding doubt about elections regardless of facts—part of a broader strategy that, according to democracy advocates, lays the groundwork to delegitimize future results and destabilize democratic norms. Election-integrity advocates on the right argue that voter fraud is a longstanding and real problem, citing historical examples and various documented cases; they note that even if fraud is not “widespread,” in close races a relatively small number of illegal votes could change an outcome, a concern the U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged when upholding voter ID laws.
From this perspective, inaccurate voter rolls—containing individuals who have moved, died, or registered in multiple states—are seen as a key vulnerability that can enable impersonation, duplicate voting, ineligible voting by noncitizens, and other forms of fraud, which is why these advocates call for more rigorous list maintenance and verification. Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation highlight a range of fraud types—from false registrations and duplicate voting to fraudulent use of absentee ballots and ballot petition fraud—and maintain that the existence of hundreds of criminal cases and overturned elections demonstrates that systemic weaknesses persist, even if they do not always produce large-scale scandals.
As a result, these groups urge states to adopt stricter protections, including requiring government-issued ID and proof of citizenship, using interstate crosscheck programs to identify and address duplicate registrations, and comparing voter rolls against other government databases to remove noncitizens and ineligible voters. Federal officials supporting the current DOJ lawsuits frame their effort to obtain statewide voter registration lists as an enforcement of transparency and accuracy requirements under the National Voter Registration Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, arguing that “clean voter rolls” are essential to protecting citizens from fraud, abuse, and the perception that elections are not secure.
Some conservative activists in California and elsewhere contend that state officials have failed to adequately maintain rolls and that resistance to sharing unredacted voter data with federal authorities signals indifference to, or active concealment of, potential irregularities—claims used to justify calls for broad audits and stronger federal oversight. These critics also dispute the view that concerns about fraud are primarily a pretext for suppressing minority and young voters; instead, they argue that robust verification and ID requirements can be implemented in ways that preserve access for eligible voters while deterring wrongdoing, and that federal cooperation with states on data-sharing is necessary to reassure a skeptical public about election integrity.
More broadly, proponents of stricter oversight assert that dismissing fraud as “extremely rare” risks minimizing genuine vulnerabilities and documented abuses; they maintain that if institutions fail to take preventive action—by auditing rolls, tightening procedures, and prosecuting offenders—public trust in democratic outcomes will continue to erode. Anita Chabria is a California columnist for the Los Angeles Times, based in Sacramento.
Before joining The Times, she worked for the Sacramento Bee as a member of its statewide investigative team and previously covered criminal justice and City Hall. Follow her on Bluesky at anitachabria.bsky.social and on X at @anitachabria.
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