We do know it’s happening, but the real question is “in what numbers?”:

A small town Kansas mayor born in Mexico. A Filipino senior citizen living in Hawaii. Two Pakistani men residing in New Jersey. An Aussie in Louisiana. And a Chinese student studying at the University of Michigan. They all have one thing in common.

Each has been charged in the last year with illegally voting in U.S. federal elections as foreigners, part of a sudden wave of prosecutions led by the Trump Justice Department for a crime that used to be among the rarest in the federal court system.

The Trump Justice Department has secured about two dozen non-citizens voting arrests, prosecutions or convictions in the last few months alone, with about another 90 more cases under investigation, officials told Just the News. And all 50 states were sent notices this month that election officials can and will be prosecuted too if they allow non-citizens to vote.

Until now, prosecutors haven’t been especially interested in pursuing the possibility. And so it’s been easy to say it just doesn’t happen. But the DOJ has started to focus on the phenomenon, and these cases are the result. How many more are there?:

Trump administration officials like Dhillon believe the total number of foreigners who made it onto voter rolls will grow into the hundreds of thousands when all the reviews of state voter rolls are completed.

Many blue and even some red states are fighting in court to block the DOJ from examining their voter rolls. The dozen or so states that have cooperated in some form have identified 20,000 to 30,000 non-citizens on their rolls, officials said. A much larger bloc of non-citizens is expected to be found in non-cooperating states such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, the officials said.

Being on the rolls isn’t the same thing as actually voting, of course. But the two can certainly be connected, especially in states that send out ballots by mail without voters having requested them.

This is part of the reason Americans feel increased distrust of the validity of US elections. Here’s a poll:

In a national survey from the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections (CTTE) at the University of California San Diego, produced in collaboration with the university’s Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research, 60% of respondents said they are confident votes will be counted accurately nationwide in the 2026 midterms. Just after the 2024 presidential election, that figure stood at 77%, a 17-point drop.

The survey of 11,406 eligible voters, conducted Dec. 19, 2025 through Jan. 12, 2026, shows trust declining by 17 percentage points among Republicans, 13 points among Democrats and 16 points among independents. The decline spans party lines, though the sources of skepticism vary.

Of course they vary, and they vary in the way you might expect:

Only 27% of Democrats, 21% of independents and 35% of Republicans say they trust that district lines are drawn in a way that fairly reflects what voters want. …

Republicans expressed higher levels of distrust about mail ballots and whether noncitizens will be prevented from casting ballots, while Democrats’ distrust focused on redistricting efforts.

Not good.