Voting rights, voter intimidation and the politics of voting have been central themes of TPM reporting going back more than 25 years. Over a quarter century you develop a lot of institutional knowledge. Today we’re seeing some of the most egregious journalistic negligence, sloppiness and ignorance helping propel forward the Trump White House’s assault on the integrity of the 2026 midterms. The piece I want to point you to this evening is Politico’s claim that DHS found “thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls in California and three other states.”
This claim is almost certainly false for reasons I’ll explain. I want to briefly summarize the multiple levels of journalistic negligence in Politico’s reporting.
Versions of this claim have been made repeatedly by various right-wing groups and sometimes government agencies. In every case the original claims fall apart on closer scrutiny. In most cases they involve crudely cross-referenced databases in which similar names lead to misidentified individuals, or former non-citizens are listed on old databases who have subsequently been naturalized. In some cases, it’s sloppiness. In other cases, it’s malicious disregard designed to generate false claims.
The key point is that there’s a long history of these claims and an equally long history of these claims falling apart in the face of the most basic scrutiny. Indeed, there have been repeated instances of detailed audits in red states, run by marquee Republican elected officials,...
Voting rights, voter intimidation and the politics of voting have been central themes of TPM reporting going back more than 25 years. Over a quarter century you develop a lot of institutional know...