According to US President Donald Trump, America is a hotbed of voting fraud – and foreigners are major culprits.

He has portrayed non-citizen voting as part of a broad Democratic Party conspiracy to dilute Republican power. He has claimed on social media that “Crazed” Democrats allow unvetted migrants to enter the US “SO THEY CAN VOTE, VOTE, VOTE.”

He has called for elections to be nationalised due to the danger of noncitizens casting ballots. And he has described illegal voting by noncitizens as so widespread that “cheating is rampant in our elections.”

He has offered little evidence for his allegations of widespread fraud, however, including his claim in a primetime speech on Thursday that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote. Now, a new Reuters analysis of federal court data undercuts Trump’s assertion that a conspiracy of noncitizen voting is afoot in America.

Case records show that federal prosecutors have charged just 129 people under a federal “voting by aliens” statute created by Congress in 1996, it was found. More than two-thirds of those prosecutions – 86 – have been filed during Trump’s five-and-a-half years in office. In none of the cases did prosecutors allege a coordinated effort to influence an election. And no defendant was accused of being paid to vote.

Instead, many appear to stem from voter confusion, miscommunication with election officials or administrative errors.

One of the people swept up in Trump’s crackdown is Dora Damatta‑Rodriguez. The 72-year-old Panama‑born grandmother had lived in the US for decades before casting a ballot in the 2016 election. She said she hoped her vote would make life better for her four children and 15 grandchildren – all US citizens.

“I wasn’t sneaking in,” she later told a judge, according to a transcript. “I believe I was doing it by the law.”

She wasn’t. Damatta, who entered the US legally in 1973 with her American husband, was convicted in a North Carolina federal court in 2019 of illegal voting. She had three decades-old misdemeanour convictions, which the judge ruled were too old to be considered in sentencing her for the voting offence.

She spent 13 days in jail and was told by immigration authorities the matter was settled. But last year, the Trump administration revisited her case. She was deported to Panama in June.

Damatta told the federal judge she had registered to vote at the local elections office using a driver’s license which, state officials said, carried a designation for noncitizens. She assumed election workers knew she wasn’t a citizen and took their acceptance of her voter-registration application as proof she could legally vote.

“I was very happy, because I’m very patriotic, even though I’m not an American.”

She said she cast her ballot for Trump. In an interview, she said she saw him as a businessman, not a politician, who would put the country on a better track. And she still supports him. “I like how he cares about America,” she said. “He’s going to get for America what America needs.”

Her case is one of 73 convictions or guilty pleas in the federal noncitizen-voting cases since 1996 identified. Among the 62 defendants whose immigration status could be determined, 49 were lawful permanent residents like her.

The pace of such prosecutions spiked in the opening stretch of Trump’s second term.

Over the past 18 months, the Trump administration has brought at least 39 voting-by-aliens prosecutions, more than any other president at this point in office in at least a quarter century, court records show.

The cases are part of a broader enforcement effort: US Department of Homeland Security agents have launched voter-fraud investigations into more than 325 people across at least six states, mostly on suspicions of noncitizen voting, according to records obtained through public information requests.

In response to questions for this story, the White House said noncitizen voting cases are “plentiful” and that Trump is committed to keeping voter rolls accurate and limited to eligible citizens. Such measures are necessary to protect the integrity of US elections, it added. “Noncitizens voting is a crime,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

Trump’s focus on noncitizen voting is part of a multi-front push to remake US elections in ways the president himself has said could cement Republican power for generations.

The administration has sued more than two dozen states that have refused to turn over their confidential voter rolls for federal review.

It has weakened federal election-security programmes designed to detect cyber threats and foreign influence operations. It has seized ballots and demanded sharp restrictions on mail-in voting. And this month, it ousted the leaders of the federal agency that helps oversee voting systems and threatened to prosecute state and local election administrators who allow noncitizens to vote.

Calling on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo identification to cast a ballot, Trump said on July 3 the bill would ensure Republicans “will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

Critics in both parties say SAVE would disenfranchise new citizens or anyone else who doesn’t have ready access to birth certificates and other documents verifying citizenship.

Eight election officials and voting-rights experts said Trump’s focus on noncitizen voting fuels unfounded fears of fraud and could lay the groundwork for challenges to November’s midterm results.

A June report by New York University’s Brennan Centre for Justice, a voting rights organisation, estimated that even a modest error rate in nationwide citizenship checks could result in tens of thousands of voters being mistakenly identified as noncitizens.

Some said the effort is part of a broader voter-suppression campaign ahead of November’s midterm elections, which will determine control of the US Congress.

“The administration is using a sledgehammer to address the issue,” said Pam Anderson, the Republican nominee for Colorado’s secretary of state in 2022 and former election official who served as president of the state-wide county clerks’ association. She said she had “grave concerns it will have a depressive effect on turnout.”

The administration is using a sledgehammer to address the issue. During his second term, Trump has directed agencies to revisit old and new noncitizen voting cases, in some instances seeking deportation years after the criminal cases were resolved, as in Damatta’s case.

To be sure, some experts believe that existing safeguards could limit aspects of Trump’s campaign. Danielle Lang, an attorney at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Centre, a voting rights group, said election laws, courts and America’s decentralized, state-run electoral system check the president’s power.

“There are a number of restrictions that are there to protect voters,” Lang said.

Election officials from both parties say noncitizen voting happens. But they add that it’s on a scale so small that it has no significant impact on election results.

“All evidence suggests that it occurs extremely infrequently,” Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s top election official and a Republican, said in an interview, citing his 15 years of experience in local and state elections.

Behind Trump’s claims of widespread and intentional fraud lies a different reality: Many of the people prosecuted said they believed they were voting legally.

Among the 73 people convicted or who pleaded guilty to the federal charge of “voting by aliens,” 40 believed they had a legal right to vote, according to court records and interviews.

Thirty-two of those said they had been signed up to vote by mistake, encouraged to register or reassured by election officials that they were eligible. Eight said they believed permanent residents could vote or took their successful registration as proof that they could.

It was not possible to determine whether the remaining 33 defendants knowingly broke the law.

Party affiliation could be established for 34 defendants: 11 were Democrats, nine Republicans and 14 had no party affiliation. The small numbers and mixed affiliations suggest the cases were not part of any coordinated effort to benefit a single party.

Forty-nine were lawful permanent residents and 13 were living in the US illegally; immigration status could not be determined in the remaining 11 cases.

Attempt to reach all 73 defendants and speak with them or their representatives in 39 cases was not successful. Nearly all requested anonymity, citing fears of further legal consequences.

Cases were identified through a review of federal court records and a database maintained by the Federal Judicial Centre, the federal courts’ research agency. Analysis of the cases was limited to federal prosecutions because states rarely bring such cases and use differing criteria.

Of the 129 federal prosecutions under the voting-by-aliens statute, the charge was dismissed in 30 cases and remains pending in 26.

In addition, Reuters found at least seven other noncitizen-voting cases brought under a broader election fraud law, six of them in the past year. Five resulted in convictions and two remain pending.

Damatta traces her error to September 2016. That month, she registered to vote in North Carolina after watching an online video that she interpreted as saying immigrants could legally vote. The video could not be identified. Two years later, she was arrested after North Carolina officials auditing voter rolls identified her as a noncitizen voter.

She was sentenced in 2019 after pleading guilty, spent nearly two weeks in jail and faced a $500 fine. At sentencing, she maintained that she believed she was eligible, although the judge said she likely knew she could not legally vote.

The case appeared closed. Then, in December 2025, immigration authorities detained Damatta during a passport check at Houston’s airport as she prepared to fly to Europe on vacation. After pulling up her 2019 conviction for noncitizen voting, they put her in detention and began deportation proceedings as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

While in custody in Texas, she prepared to contest her case at an April 9 hearing. But when the day arrived, she learned that the court already had ordered her removal. She was deported to Panama in June.

“It feels like I was executed in Texas,” she said by telephone from a small town in Chiriqui province in Panama where she’s now living.

In response to questions about Damatta’s case, Homeland Security said she was a “criminal illegal alien” who entered the US illegally through Mexico in 2009.

Court records from her 2019 voting case, however, show she was a lawful permanent resident. Her lawyer told the court she had been living legally in the US for more than four decades, and an image of her green card shared with Reuters shows she obtained permanent resident status in 1973 as the spouse of a US citizen.

The Homeland Security statement also said she had a criminal record that included alien smuggling, disorderly conduct and driving under the influence. Federal and state court records, however, show no convictions or prosecutions of her for those offenses.

The records reviewed showed three older misdemeanour convictions – for shoplifting in 1982, driving without a proper licence in 1995 and larceny in 1997, which the judge in her voting case ruled were too old to be considered at sentencing.

After Reuters presented Homeland Security with findings contradicting its allegations, the agency repeated the claims without providing evidence.

The circumstances that led some noncitizens to vote often began with mundane encounters: a conversation with a county clerk, a voter-registration drive or a misunderstanding left uncorrected for years. One man told a judge that a Florida motor vehicle office clerk incorrectly informed him that he could vote because he was married to a US citizen.

In a letter to a judge disclosed in court, one noncitizen voter explained why he trusted advice from a clerk at a state motor vehicle licensing office and registered to vote.

Another testified that a canvasser urged her to register even after she disclosed she was not a citizen, suggesting it could help her path to naturalisation. At least three said in legal documents that they used government-issued identification when they registered and were never told they were ineligible. They later cast ballots in federal elections and were penalized years afterward.

The defendants came from at least 33 countries, including Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Poland, Israel, Nigeria and Canada.

A 66-year-old Ohio man who emigrated from Germany as a child and never became a US citizen told Reuters he was registered to vote while getting license plates at a Bureau of Motor Vehicles office near Cleveland years ago. When he said he wasn’t eligible, an official brushed it aside, telling him he could register as long as he had standard identification, he recalled. He went on to vote in 12 elections between 2009 and 2024. He also requested an absentee ballot for Ohio’s 2020 Republican primary, voting records show.

“I didn’t even know what the hell I was signing up for,” said the man, who spoke on condition of anonymity amid the immigration crackdown.

Under Trump, federal law enforcement officials have been directed to prioritize prosecutions and deportations for noncitizen voting, according to executive orders, public statements by senior officials and an internal Homeland Security memo. Some Republican-led states such as Ohio and Texas – both of which have competitive US Senate races this year – are enthusiastic partners.

• A Reuters report