Local GOP officials are taking aggressive steps to probe prior elections that mimic actions from the Trump administration’s hunt for 2020 voter fraud.
Local Republican officials across the country are taking aggressive steps to probe prior elections — from seizing ballots to making sweeping claims of noncitizens on the voter rolls — that mimic actions from the Trump administration’s hunt for 2020 voter fraud.
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, the official responsible for voter registration referred for prosecution more than 200 people suspected of being registered to vote as noncitizens, based on a database that’s turned up false positives elsewhere. The clerk in Macomb County, Michigan, touted noncitizen voters he claimed to have uncovered using jury records as he runs for secretary of state. And in California, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — a Republican candidate for governor — last month seized 650,000 ballots from the state’s 2025 special election to investigate a processing discrepancy alleged by conservative activists. They’re all facing pushback from state authorities who raised concerns that the probes don’t follow the law or go beyond the local officials’ expertise. As allies of President Donald Trump have seized on the new fraud claims, state officials have also said the allegations overstate the threat of fraudulent elections and the extent of noncitizen voting. Trump has continued to make baseless allegations that Democrats are cheating in elections and has urged Republicans to “nationalize the voting.” His administration has already seized 2020 election materials from Maricopa and from Fulton County, Georgia, through criminal investigations. Election officials and experts fear that the Trump administration or Trump-aligned state and local officials could be emboldened to take actions that disrupt or cast doubt on the upcoming midterm elections. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a lawsuit Thursday that the Riverside sheriff’s investigation “threatens to sow distrust and jeopardize public confidence in the upcoming primary and general elections, not just in Riverside County but around the State.” “It also sets a dangerous precedent that could invite future attempts to improperly contest election results through a misuse of law enforcement authority and the criminal process,” Bonta said in the lawsuit, seeking a court order halt to the review. ‘Taking things to a new level’ The seizure of ballots in Riverside is particularly worrisome to election officials and experts heading into the 2026 midterms. “It complicates things incredibly,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney who heads the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Riverside is a great example, where you’ve got a candidate for governor who appears to be politicizing a confirmed landslide election.” The local officials have defended their reviews and have accused their state counterparts of interfering with investigations that they argue should be welcomed if they want to restore public confidence in elections. “Why would you interfere and obstruct an investigation instead of assist? What are you afraid of?” Bianco said in a statement to CNN. Trump administration officials, meanwhile, have cheered on the efforts as Republicans pursue sweeping new voting legislation that would include strict new ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements. “It’s very refreshing to see local law enforcement take action on these types of issues,” Harmeet Dhillon, chief of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said on Newsmax last week. “Too often everyone runs to the federal government, asks us to be the police of everything, but actually this type of thing should be investigated by local law enforcement.” The pattern of ballot seizures by federal and local officials is “extremely worrisome,” said Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. While the seizures by the Trump administration and the Riverside County sheriff are scrutinizing settled elections, if law enforcement took ballots from an active election before a contest was decided, Hasen said, it would amount to a break in the chain of custody that would threaten the integrity of the vote. “That is truly taking things to a new level,” he said. The state elections authorities who are pushing back at local officials’ sweeping fraud claims are also wary of how those allegations could feed into the Trump administration’s desperate widespread attempts to dig up proof of mass voter fraud. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes recently warned local officials in the state against complying with any demand that might come from federal investigators for election material. “We have a sacred duty to protect our constituents’ privacy and uphold the law, and we urge you to stand with American democracy and protect Arizona citizens from the federal government’s unprecedented abuse of authority,” the letter said. Fueled by work of outside activists As was the case with the FBI’s seizure of Fulton County’s 2020 ballots, the investigation launched by Bianco was driven by allegations made by citizen activists who have closely scrutinized election administration, using their own reviews of voting materials to put forward sweeping theories of fraud. Bianco obtained multiple search warrants based on claims by the Riverside Election Integrity Team, a local activist group, which alleged a 40,000-plus discrepancy between hand logs of 2025 ballots as they came into election offices and the certified number of ballots in the machine count. The Riverside Registrar of Voters, in a lengthy presentation to the county board last month, pointed out flaws in REIT’s approach and said the discrepancy was only 103. Counties virtually never have a perfect match between those comparisons, the California attorney general said in court filings. Bonta demanded that Bianco put his investigation on hold, citing the supervisory power attorney general has over sheriffs. Bianco instead obtained an additional warrant from the judge, and his attorney told CNN that warrant allowed the review to move forward under the supervision of a special master appointed by the court. Bonta, however, questioned description of that most recent warrant in court filings that also revealed the sheriff seized another 426 boxes of materials on Tuesday, when litigation was pending challenging the review. The California attorney general now has parallel cases seeking judicial intervention at the county court and the state supreme court. “I do not understand why the attorney general would be fighting so hard to try to prevent an investigation unless the attorney general has something to hide,” said the sheriff’s lawyer, Robert Tyler. Getting the attention of Trump allies Elsewhere in the country, local election officials have been eager to tout reviews of voter rolls that they say show a major problem of noncitizen registration and voting — reviews their state counterparts say are half-baked or not compliant with legal procedures. In several cases, their findings have drawn the attention of the Trump administration. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, recently scolded Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini — who is running as a Republican for Benson’s current office — for making “reckless accusations” when he publicly promoted a review of noncitizens he said he found on his rolls, after her office determined some of those people were citizens. Forlini, who oversees elections in Michigan’s third-largest county, had discussed his review while promoting his candidacy for Michigan secretary of state on various right-wing platforms earlier this year. It was based on a comparison of voter rolls against people who report as noncitizens on jury forms — an approach election experts warn does not provide definitive proof of voter fraud, because people can lie to get out of serving or accidentally click the wrong box. When Benson — who is now running for governor — looked at claims he rolled out in January of 15 alleged noncitizens on the rolls, she found that three were citizens and four had already had their registration canceled. She also issued guidance to local election officials stressing the need for additional investigation when using jury forms to find noncitizens on voter rolls. Still, Forlini’s announcement got the attention of a top Trump appointee at the Justice Department, as well the president’s allies in Congress. Dhillon, the DOJ civil rights chief who has sued 29 states for confidential voter information on their registration rolls, twice amplified Forlini’s claims on X, while House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer requested that the department investigate the matter. Forlini told CNN that his public spat with Benson was essentially a breakdown of communications and that he would not have made claims publicly had her office been responsive to his efforts to raise his findings to her privately. “I am considering this a help to the secretary of state’s office,” he said of his efforts to vet his voter rolls. In a follow-up review that he said found 18 potential noncitizens on the rolls, three of those individuals had records showing they had voted. Federal investigators subpoenaed that information, Forlini told CNN, after previously visiting him in his office to discuss his claims. Likewise, Bianco said at a press conference earlier this month that he’d been in touch with the Justice Department. And when then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem traveled to Arizona and made vague claims of mass voter fraud in the state, she met with Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, who says he found dozens of suspected noncitizens in voter registration records there and referred them to the county attorney. Using a DHS database Heap’s findings were based on records in the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, also known as the SAVE data system. Election experts and state officials have cautioned that the use of the DHS database in other states to identify noncitizen voters has often ensnared US citizens, including those who recently became naturalized, and so additional vetting is necessary before removing those people from the rolls or suggesting they committed a crime. Heap, whose office maintains the county’s voter file, announced last month that he had identified 137 registered voters who were not US citizens, including 60 who had voted. He’s since referred those and another 70 names turned up this month to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office for potential prosecution. A spokeswoman for Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, cautioned that the SAVE database has a lag time for new citizens to be included, warning that it would be “imperative for Maricopa County to do independent research to verify that these voters were not citizens before canceling their registration.” A spokesperson for Heap did not respond to requests for comment. While Heap’s predecessor, Stephen Richer — a Republican whom Heap defeated in the 2024 primary — also used the SAVE database to verify individuals’ naturalization status, he warned against making sweeping conclusions based on matches in that database alone. “I probably would have wanted to do some digging” before referring those flagged for prosecution, Richer told CNN, “given the number of false positives that have been reported in other jurisdictions.” Even the “worst-case scenario” that Heap laid out meant there were 200 noncitizens registered out of the nearly 2 million who cast ballots in the county, said Richer, who stood up to Trump’s 2020 election reversal schemes. “I just caution against any sort of notion that these are hardened criminals each of whom had a long-mediated plot to participate in American election,” he said.
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