Earlier on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal enforcement action on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas.
When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, lived up to the billing.
While six of those charged cast ballots in the 2024 general election, the impact of their votes was almost immeasurably small, given that two of them cast provisional ballots that were not counted, and 11,388,670 other Texans voted in that election.
Donald Trump, whose false claim that voting by non-citizens is inspired the investigation, won the state by a margin of 1,558,347 votes over his nearest rival, Kamala Harris.
Of the four illegal votes that were counted in error, three were cast by green card holders from Nigeria, India and Mexico, who might have wrongly thought they were eligible to vote, and just one by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.
Lawful permanent residents are not allowed to vote in federal elections, but they are permitted to vote in local elections in the District of Columbia and in some jurisdictions of three US states: California, Maryland and Vermont.
Still, the administration framed the criminal charges against the handful of ineligible voters in Texas as significant and even invited a Fox News crew to film the arrest of one of the green-card holders: a 27-year-old from Nigeria who allegedly voted in 2018, two years after becoming a lawful permanent resident.
The video was broadcast multiple times on the president’s favorite network on Tuesday.
“I was reliably told this never happens,” the Fox host Will Cain said with sarcasm after a report on the arrest. “We know now at least it’s happened seven times.”