Many posts have discussed immigration. Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare.
Last night, Trump claimed there were 278,000 noncitizens who had registered to vote. At PolitiFact, Louis Jacobson provides reasons for skepticism.
Experts cited several reasons to be cautious about the headline number and how Trump and Mullin framed it.
For starters, Homeland Security’s letters to state officials used more cautious language — glossed over in public remarks by Trump and Mullin — that called it a "preliminary review" and said that there "may be as many as" the number of noncitizens they found on the voter rolls.
At his press conference, Mullin did not identify the individuals as potential noncitizens; he simply called them "noncitizens."
Another reason for caution is history.
In the past, when government officials have announced initial numbers of noncitizens on voter rolls, those figures have dropped dramatically after months of vetting by state and local officials and the media.
In 2012, then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott ordered state officials to clear the rolls of noncitizen voters ahead of the election.
Florida initially assembled a list of about 180,000 potential noncitizens. With more scrutiny, however, officials whittled the count to about 2,600 names, then 198, then 85. The initial list was rife with errors, even flagging a Brooklyn-born World War II veteran.
