Election experts cast doubt on Trump and Mullin claim 250,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in four US states
Election security experts are not convinced by the new claim from Donald Trump and his homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin that, as the president said on Thursday, “more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote” in four states run by Democrats.
According to a one-page document released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Thursday, and letters to election officials in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada from Mullin, that figure comes from running public voter information through a DHS immigration database that was created for an entirely different purpose: to verify eligibility for federal benefits.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said on Friday that he was told at a White House briefing this week that the “250,000 noncitizens” figure was based on a comparison with commercial data, which is less detailed than voter records and can lead to errors.
“That 250,000 number is an irresponsible number to share given the opaque methodology that they claimed here,” Becker said, according to Democracy Docket, a voting rights nonprofit founded by Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias.
Among the known issues with using federal immigration data revealed in the past is that naturalized citizens, who previously lived in the US as noncitizens, can still be listed in older records as ineligible to vote.
In 2024, for instance, the Campaign Legal Center successfully sued the state of Alabama for purging naturalized citizens from its voter rolls just because they had previously been issued a so-called noncitizen identification number (often called an A-number) by DHS.
In May, the Associated Press reported on the case of a naturalized citizen who was born on South Africa and lives in Texas but “was flagged as a potential noncitizen when Texas ran its voter file through the DHS verification system.” The man, who became a citizen more than a decade ago, had his voter registration canceled last year, while he was waiting for a new passport to replace an expired one.
According to census data, nearly 26 million US citizens are foreign-born, naturalized citizens, who previously lived in the US as noncitizens.
Mullin alleged in his letters to the four states that “DHS has identified over 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote”, including: 190,832 in California; 35,152 in New Jersey; 15,903 in Nevada, and 14,576 in Pennsylvania.
Data available elsewhere on the DHS website, however, indicates that much larger numbers of naturalized citizens live in each state. Of the 7.9 million naturalized citizens who became Americans in the decade before 2025, over 1.2 million live in California; nearly 400,000 live in New Jersey; nearly 100,000 live in Nevada and nearly 200,000 live in Pennsylvania.
Wendy Weiser, a vice president at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in a social media post on Friday that the DHS estimates shared by Mullin “are almost certainly false or wildly overstated. This administration has a poor track record with false allegations of election improprieties.”
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, thanks for reading. Here are the latest developments:
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Election security experts are not convinced by the new claim from Donald Trump and his homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin that, as the president said on Thursday, “more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote” in four states run by Democrats.
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Trump focused heavily on parts of a 2020 US intelligence assessment that detailed what he called “China’s sinister election meddling”, but a review of the declassified document reveals that American spies were more concerned with efforts by another nation, Russia, to meddle in the 2020 election, in an effort to help Trump by denigrating his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.
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Trump urged Darline Graham Nordone, who was appointed this week to serve out the remainder of her late brother Lindsey Graham’s term in the US Senate, which ends in January 2027, to enter the election to replace her brother for a full term.
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Trump blasted Canada for its response to the persistent wildfires and the smoke which has blanketed parts of the US, including New Jersey, where he is due to watch the World Cup final at an outdoor stadium on Sunday.
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Trump’s media company is planning to charge for special high-speed access to Truth Social posts, including possibly his own, affecting national security and financial markets.
US intelligence assessment released by Trump says Russia tried to help him win 2020 election by spreading lies about Biden and Ukraine
In his primetime address on Thursday, Donald Trump focused heavily on parts of a US intelligence assessment that detailed what he called “China’s sinister election meddling”, but a review of the declassified 2020 assessment released by the White House reveals that American spies were more concerned with efforts by another nation, Russia, to meddle in the 2020 election and help Trump by denigrating his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden.
In his speech, Trump mentioned China 14 times and Russia just once, in passing. The president made no mention at all of the fact that the intelligence assessment, prepared of 19 August 2020, sounded the alarm about a campaign by the Russian government to help Trump win the 2020 election, by spreading lies about Biden’s role in Ukraine during his time as Barack Obama’s vice-president.
“President Putin and senior Russian officials are overseeing efforts by proxies,” the assessment titled Foreign Threats to 2020 US Federal Elections says, “to spread claims about former Vice President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 US election.”
“These claims include that when the former Vice President was in office, he engaged in criminal activity in his dealings with Ukraine and individuals tied to Ukrainian energy firm Burisma,” the assessment continues, making reference to the firm that put Hunter Biden on its board, and was at the center of multiple conspiracy theories about the Bidens pushed by Rudy Giuliani in 2019.
In an effort to find, or manufacture, dirt on Joe Biden, Giuliani traveled to Ukraine and met with pro-Russian figures, including a former member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andriy Derkach, to record what he called a documentary for the pro-Trump cable channel One American News (OAN). Later in 2020, Trump’s own treasury department sanctioned Derkach as a Russian agent.
The 2020 intelligence assessment Trump released this week also said this:
Derkach, Kilimnik, and other proxy actors affiliated with the Russian Government are advancing such narratives with US officials and other prominent persons as well as online, including through personal interactions and audio and documentary film releases via US and Ukrainian media outlets.
These figures are conspiring to intensify their efforts as the election approaches to orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal implicating former Vice President Biden and the Democratic Party at the peak of the 2020 US presidential campaign.
Their aim is to defeat the former Vice President and ensure the President’s victory. Some of these proxy actors anticipate that Ukraine-themed narratives about Democratic corruption will play a decisive role in the election and that US persons are key to propagating these narratives.
The second Russian proxy mentioned by name in the assessment, “Kilimnik”, was likely Konstantin Kilimnik, who ran the Kyiv office of a political consulting firm led by Paul Manafort, who worked to elect pro-Russia candidates in Ukraine, before becoming Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. According to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s efforts to aid Trump in the 2016 campaign, Manafort gave Kilimnik confidential Trump campaign polling data that year.
In 2021, when the US treasury department sanctioned Kilimnik for “having engaged in foreign interference” in the 2020 US presidential election, it also alleged that, in 2016, “Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy. Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
That Trump chose not to mention any of this part of the intelligence assessment is not surprising, since it seems to confirm that his own efforts to spread rumors that Biden had engaged in corruption in Ukraine – which included putting pressure on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce investigations of the Bidens and of a bizarre conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election – amplified a Russian influence campaign intended to help him win the 2020 election by spreading those same lies.
Uwa Ede-Osifo
Paul Pelosi, husband of US congresswoman and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, is facing a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge after he allegedly crashed into a parked vehicle and left the scene in early July, the Napa county district attorney announced on Friday.
No passengers were in the struck car, authorities said, but the vehicle was left with “major” damage. A spokesperson for the Pelosi family told several outlets in a statement that Paul Pelosi apologized to the owner of the vehicle and was assuming responsibility for the damage.
Pelosi, 86, has also been charged with an infraction of making an unlawful turn related to the 3 July incident in Yountville, California. His arraignment is scheduled for 14 August. A representative for Pelosi could not be immediately reached for comment.
Dara Kerr
An employee of a company that runs an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Colorado is under arrest after shooting and injuring a woman on Thursday evening. The incident happened after the woman participated in a protest in front of the facility earlier that day, according to the Aurora police department.
When officers arrived on the scene, they said they found the woman with a gunshot wound in her lower body. She had a friend with her, who was unharmed.
Police said they stopped a man in his vehicle not far from the scene. They seized his car and gun and identified him as Brandon Booth, 42, an employee for Geo Group.
“We are aware that an off-duty Aurora ICE Processing Center employee was involved in a shooting incident,” a spokesperson for Geo Group said in an email. “This individual has been placed on unpaid administrative leave, and we will fully cooperate with law enforcement.”
Geo Group is a $4bn company that runs a vast network of private immigration detention centers and state prisons across the US. The company has deep ties to the government with numerous multi-year contracts with the Department of Homeland Security for detention facilities, transportation services and immigrant-tracking programs. In June, the former Geo Group executive David Venturella was named the acting director of ICE.
Sam Levine
Donald Trump offered a litany of misleading and false claims during his Thursday speech on threats to US elections, and released previously classified documents to try to support his specious claims. In some cases, his claims were not supported by those documents. Here is a look at some of the key claims that could mislead the American public.
Election experts cast doubt on Trump and Mullin claim 250,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in four US states
Election security experts are not convinced by the new claim from Donald Trump and his homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin that, as the president said on Thursday, “more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote” in four states run by Democrats.
According to a one-page document released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Thursday, and letters to election officials in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada from Mullin, that figure comes from running public voter information through a DHS immigration database that was created for an entirely different purpose: to verify eligibility for federal benefits.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said on Friday that he was told at a White House briefing this week that the “250,000 noncitizens” figure was based on a comparison with commercial data, which is less detailed than voter records and can lead to errors.
“That 250,000 number is an irresponsible number to share given the opaque methodology that they claimed here,” Becker said, according to Democracy Docket, a voting rights nonprofit founded by Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias.
Among the known issues with using federal immigration data revealed in the past is that naturalized citizens, who previously lived in the US as noncitizens, can still be listed in older records as ineligible to vote.
In 2024, for instance, the Campaign Legal Center successfully sued the state of Alabama for purging naturalized citizens from its voter rolls just because they had previously been issued a so-called noncitizen identification number (often called an A-number) by DHS.
In May, the Associated Press reported on the case of a naturalized citizen who was born on South Africa and lives in Texas but “was flagged as a potential noncitizen when Texas ran its voter file through the DHS verification system.” The man, who became a citizen more than a decade ago, had his voter registration canceled last year, while he was waiting for a new passport to replace an expired one.
According to census data, nearly 26 million US citizens are foreign-born, naturalized citizens, who previously lived in the US as noncitizens.
Mullin alleged in his letters to the four states that “DHS has identified over 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote”, including: 190,832 in California; 35,152 in New Jersey; 15,903 in Nevada, and 14,576 in Pennsylvania.
Data available elsewhere on the DHS website, however, indicates that much larger numbers of naturalized citizens live in each state. Of the 7.9 million naturalized citizens who became Americans in the decade before 2025, over 1.2 million live in California; nearly 400,000 live in New Jersey; nearly 100,000 live in Nevada and nearly 200,000 live in Pennsylvania.
Wendy Weiser, a vice president at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in a social media post on Friday that the DHS estimates shared by Mullin “are almost certainly false or wildly overstated. This administration has a poor track record with false allegations of election improprieties.”
Trump praises Messi, Ronaldo and Harry Kane before offering his own analysis of England-Argentina match
Donald Trump just concluded his remarks at the Fifa office in New York City, which is located in Trump Tower in what is no doubt a total coincidence that in no way deserves scrutiny.
The president reminded the audience that, while he is not a fan of the sport, he has palled around with two of the games stars: Cristiano Ronaldo, “a great guy” who attended Trump’s White House dinner in honor of the brutal Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, last November, and Harry Kane, “a great player,” who admitted during the tournament that he had played golf with Trump about 18 months ago and promptly stopped scoring.
Trump then offered what he called his own analysis of England’s semi-final loss to Argentina.
“I watched that pass that Messi made – not knowing as much as the people in this room, but I know about sports and I know about a little bit about soccer,” Trump said, referring to the cross for the winning goal from Argentina’s captain, Lionel Messi.
“But I watched Messi and he was well guarded, right? Well guarded, and all of a sudden he’s standing on the right,” Trump continued. “I don’t know if anybody … I just noticed it. Nobody talked about it. I just noticed it. I said, ‘He’s so well guarded by a great player.’ And then he moved to the right, and the other player was just standing there and he had plenty of time. He kicked it. It was within, I would say, a quarter of an inch of being perfect. And that was the end of the game.”
Despite the president’s claim, a very large number of people did indeed talk, during and after the match, about the fact that Messi had taken up a position on the right wing and feinted left before moving right to create space to strike his cross with his weaker fight foot.
The president then undermined his claim to understand football by adding that England “perhaps made a mistake when they made” Harry Kane “a defensive player.”
“They took the lead, and they took their best player and they put him on defense,” Trump asserted, with the confidence of a large language model trained on American football churning out a tactical analysis of England’s fatal decision to drop deep under pressure from Argentina after taking a 1-0 lead early in the second half of the semifinal.
The anti-immigrant president also waxed lyrical about the joy of people from foreign nations attending the World Cup, or, at least, from the one where his mother was born.
“Fans from 200 countries attended 104 games, spread across 16 Northern American cities,” Trump said, “My mother comes from Scotland, my father comes from Germany. When I saw the Scottish bagpipes and the Scottish, they were going wild.” The president’s mother was born in Scotland; his father was conceived in Germany but born in New York, three months after his immigrant parents arrived in the US, having been deported from their homeland.
At the end of his remarks at the Fifa event, Trump and Infantino were played off to the president’s rally theme song, YMCA.
Trump tells Fifa reception 2020 election was ‘rigged’, boasts about getting US player’s red card suspended
Donald Trump began his remarks at the Fifa reception in Trump Tower in New York by saying that his first response Fifa president Gianni Infantino coming to him with the “crazy idea” to host a World Cup in the United States was that he must be crazy because “we’re not a soccer country.”
The president did not mention that the World Cup was hosted in the US in 1994.
Later in his remarks, after a digression to claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, and praising the footballing skills of his son, Barron, and his father-in-law, Trump lavished praise on Infantino for bowing to pressure from him to suspend the red card handed out to US striker Folarin Balogun.
“This has been a tournament like no other, filled with fierce competition, unforgettable moments,” Trump said. “You had unforgettable moments like probably the most unforgettable is when they gave that gentlemen, is it a red card? And I was forced to call Gianni and just make a recommendation. I said, ‘Gianni, I’d like to make a recommendation: let the guy in the game.’ No, I didn’t say that. I said, ‘I’d like to wage a complaint,’ and actually I didn’t.”
“You made another great decision,” Trump told Infantino of the decision to allow Balogun to play in the next match, against Belgium. “Gianni made yet another of his many good decisions.”
Donald Trump enters Fifa event in New York to strains of his rally theme song
Donald Trump just appeared on stage at Trump Tower in New York with the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, at a Fifa reception ahead of the World Cup final this weekend to the strains of Trump’s rally walk-on music. Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA.
While Infantino spoke first, he focused his remarks on praising Trump, thanking him for creating a “safe and secure” environment for the World Cup, without mentioning that an immigration crackdown had denied entry to a Fifa referee from Somalia and denied many fans the opportunity to travel to the US for the tournament.
Trump urges Lindsey Graham’s sister to enter snap Republican primary for his Senate seat
In a social media post on Friday, Donald Trump urged Darline Graham Nordone, who was appointed this week to serve out the remainder of her late brother Lindsey Graham’s term in the US Senate, which ends in January 2027, to enter the election to replace her brother for a full term.
Lindsey Graham was running for reelection in the November midterms when he died suddenly last weekend. His sister was sworn in this week to serve as a South Carolina senator the remaining six months of the current term.
Trump revealed that he has “asked Darline, for the Good of our Nation, to run for the U.S. Senate in the Special Republican Primary on Tuesday, August 11, 2026.”
“Darline, who comes from an absolutely incredible family,” Trump added, “should she accept, has my Complete and Total Endorsement in the Special Election for U.S. Senate in South Carolina — SHE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN. RUN, DARLINE, RUN!”
Should Darline Graham win the snap Republican primary to replace her brother as the party’s nominee in the November elections, it would be her first elected office.
As the nonprofit news site the 19th reports, Darline Graham is a career civil servant who has worked for decades on publicly funded programs in South Carolina that help people with disabilities overcome barriers to employment.
Trump accuses Canada of ‘willful negligence’ in response to wildfire smoke blanketing parts of US
Donald Trump has blasted Canada for its response to the persistent wildfires and the smoke which has blanketed parts of the US.
As my colleague Edward Helmore reports, the smoke has affected about 109 million people across the midwest, mid-Atlantic and north-east.
“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The president said he would call Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, to find out his next steps.
“The cost is incalculable!” Trump raged on social media. “This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”
Trump joined the chorus of anger after four Republican Michigan representatives in Congress wrote to Carney this week, accusing his government of not doing enough to prevent wildfire smoke drifting into the US.
There were more than 880 active fires across Canada as of Friday, according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.
This week, Carney responded to the bubbling criticism from conservative US lawmakers and commentators. “Climate change is everyone’s responsibility,” he said in French at a press conference. “Including the United States.”
A quick note that Donald Trump is traveling to New York today for the Fifa reception on the 747-8 that the received from the Qatari royal family. The new Air Force One has been the subject of much scrutiny after the New York Times reported that Trump had to leave the Nato summit in Ankara earlier this month on the old Air Force One, instead of the Qatari-donated jet, as a security precaution.
Sources who spoke to the Times said that the new plane does not have all the features of the older plane.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, doubled down on Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated election claims on Friday amid his agency’s efforts to support the president’s agenda. Trump used a memo compiled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the basis of many of his unsubstantiated claims on Thursday during his televised primetime address to the nation.
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Mullin claimed that DHS identified “250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in California, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada”. However, election experts, including David Becker, the executive director of the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the administration has not been “transparent about the methodology” in reaching that number.
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Mullin also claimed that 28,000 noncitizens have been identified on the voter rolls of the more than 20 states that have “proactively” worked with the administration on the Save program – a tool implemented by DHS to verify citizenship status. Becker noted that this number sounds plausible, but it is only 0.04% of the 68 million eligible voters in those states. “One thing that I love about numbers, and I love about facts is they don’t lie,” Mullin told reporters today.
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Mullin also repeated many of the president’s baseless conspiracy theories that he pushed on Thursday evening – particularly that voting machines are unsafe and insecure. This, despite election officials and cybersecurity experts routinely underscoring that these machines are not connected to the internet and undergo scrupulous testing before each election to make sure they haven’t been compromised.
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Mullin also repeated his threat of withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency grant funding to states that don’t work to “secure” elections. “If they’re not willing to do it, it should raise serious questions. It’s not that hard. This isn’t a partisan issue,” the homeland security secretary said. The federal government has previously sought access to state voter rolls, which contain the personal data of millions of Americans. States have refused to turn the data over, resulting in a number of lawsuits that the administration has lost.
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In other news, Trump’s media company is planning to charge for special high-speed access to Truth Social posts, including possibly his own, affecting national security and financial markets. The move announced on Thursday would allow Wall Street trading firms and other institutions to get news first from top Truth Social contributors so they could profit off subsequent moves in stocks, bonds and interest rates. It follows similar offers of paid access on rival platforms, although with one key difference: the most popular Truth Social poster is the president himself, and, as the biggest shareholder of the publicly traded parent company, he would benefit directly.
Further to our earlier post, DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin has shared on social media four letters he has penned to the secretaries of state for California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
His department allegedly found “over 250,000 non-citizens registered to vote in four state”, Mullin claims. As Shrai noted earlier, election experts have said the Trump administration has not been “transparent about the methodology” in reaching that number.
In each letter, Mullin writes that his department’s preliminary review found a number of registrants in that state “for whom the name, date of birth, address, and social security number match a non-citizen in our files”.
“The most efficient way to ensure accuracy of our findings is to work collaboratively on identity verification,” he says, adding that DHS has resources available to assist the state in verifying the individuals’ identities.
This methodology is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, as Mullin says himself, there hasn’t been any verification yet on the identities of those people the review has supposedly identified. Secondly, being registered to vote and actually voting are two separate things; someone might be registered but not actually cast a ballot in a given election. And, as citizenship status can change over time, his department would need to prove the individuals were not citizens at the time of actually casting a ballot. In sum, what Mullin has said so far isn’t sufficient evidence that illegal voting has taken place in these numbers.
Appointed senator Darline Graham, the sister of the late Lindsey Graham, indicated to the White House yesterday that she may be interested in running for a full Senate term in South Carolina, Semafor reports, citing three people familiar with internal party deliberations.
Graham was appointed to serve for the rest of the year after the sudden death of her brother last Saturday. Donald Trump encouraged South Carolina governor Henry McMaster to appoint her to the seat, she was sworn in on Tuesday and, by yesterday, she had already joined with Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal to introduce the Russia sanctions bill her late brother worked on in the months preceding his death.
It’s unclear if she would have Trump’s support for such a move, despite his enthusiasm for her to serve as “interim senator” as a “fabulous tribute to Lindsey Graham”.
As Semafor notes, “picking Darline Graham as an interim senator was supposed to allow the administration more time to decide on a possible GOP primary endorsement in South Carolina. It was also designed to free whomever Trump chose from the distraction of campaigning for the full-term nomination.
“If Darline Graham runs, she’ll have to juggle Senate duties with a lightning-quick 11 August Republican primary, and a potential runoff two weeks later if no candidate wins a majority. However, if she does become the GOP pick, it could help House speaker Mike Johnson by preventing a House member from winning the seat and shrinking his margin later this year.”
