This posting follows up with September 14 developments on Trump’s campaign on illegal voters. In sum, the administration is surrepiciously implementing its real plan. Unburdened by evidence of non-voting eligible people on voting rolls of more than a few hundred in a state, the Trump administration continues to work this issue.
Yesterday, in United States Postal Service v California, the Supreme Court 7-2 dealt a death blow to what I call the Postal Service plan for this November, without a majority opinion but with one concurring and two dissenting (Alioto and Thomas) opinions. The apparent rationale is that to apply the plan would at this time impose an intolerable burden on state and local officials. This leaves what I call the Postal Serbice plan basically viable for 2028.
The administration’s legal argument comes to this: State and local election systems can set their own rules but do not have the authority to set rules for how the Postal Service oversees the delivery of mail – by content, envelop design, address management, etc. the Postal Service has been granted wide discretion. Were there no last-minute controversy, the case (again, United States Postal Service v California) might have swung in favor of the administration.
In my recent post, ”Trump’s real plan to control state and local voting,” I lay out what I think is the real administration’s strategy, which is to apply its own databases against state voter lists and to reject matches that appear to show a non-citizen on a voter list. I noted the quality control and other issues involved.
Alabama has undertaken to so this voluntarily, resulting in 184 findings out of a population of three million.
On the same day (Sept 14) of the Supreme Court decision, Senator Alex Padill, and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced the receipt of a new whistleblower disclosure they received on September 8. The whistleblower disclosed that over the past month or so DHS and USCIS have been inspecting state voting list directly, using their own staffs and applying undisclosed methods. This is an effort to apply the administration’s strategy presumably to come up with hair-raising accounts of how a Syrian suicide bomber has voted repeatedly.
DHS launched an “Unlawful Voter Initiative” in August 2026 to look for noncitizens who had registered or voted. It assigned hundreds of employees from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate to the effort. On August 21, they were told to watch a training video lasting about an hour and 45 minutes. By August 25, they were reviewing names supplied by DHS. The stated target was 40 cases per employee per day, or roughly 12 minutes per person, with the rushed review to be completed by September 12.
DHS supplied data suggesting that particular people might be unlawful voters. Some of that data reportedly came from its SAVE immigration-status system (see my prior post.)
Officers then compared federal data about a person’s citizenship and immigration history with state voter records. To retrieve individual records from state websites, they (per the whistleblower) entered identifying details such as birth dates or partial Social Security numbers and, where required, claimed to be the voter or to have the voter’s permission. The whistleblower says those claims were false and may have violated state laws governing access to voter information.
Officers were then instructed to create a record in the federal “TEC” law enforcement database, a shared repository for suspected persons. These records were to be identified as “unlawful voters.” This despite the often – shown problems in searching for non-voters due to inconsistent, out of date, mistakenly matched records.
In all of this, why to bureaucrats go along with the idee fixe that there are loads of illegal voters? The bureaucratic mentality after years of experience boils down to perfectly applying orders from above.