The Trump administration has sent a warning letter to Idaho’s top election official threatening potential criminal prosecution if noncitizens cast ballots in the 2026 federal midterm elections, part of a broader federal push to gain access to voter rolls across the country.

The Justice Department sent similar letters to election officials in all 50 states this week, according to the seven-page correspondence. The move comes as the administration pursues an aggressive enforcement agenda on election integrity, having filed lawsuits against 30 states seeking access to voter registration data.

Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, has refused to provide the Justice Department access to sensitive information on the state’s approximately 1 million registered voters. A lawsuit filed by the Justice Department against McGrane remains on hold as the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals considers related cases from Oregon and California that the federal government lost.

U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill approved the pause in McGrane’s case on May 21. As of late last month, no court had ruled in the Justice Department’s favor in any of its voter roll access cases nationwide.

Idaho’s Election Security Measures

Idaho has taken steps to address noncitizen voting. In 2024, McGrane and Governor Brad Little signed an executive order aimed at preventing noncitizens from registering and voting. That same year, Idaho voters approved a constitutional amendment clarifying that noncitizens cannot vote in state elections.

An audit of Idaho’s voter rolls flagged approximately 30 individuals as possible noncitizens. Idaho State Police referred about a dozen of those people to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for potential prosecution, though no prosecutions of those individuals appear to have moved forward.

Since Trump took office in January 2025, federal prosecutors have brought about two dozen cases involving noncitizen voting nationwide. None have been filed in Idaho.

Questions About Scale

The administration’s enforcement push has raised questions about the actual scope of the problem. Benjamin Cover, a legal analyst, noted the discrepancy between claims of widespread noncitizen voting and actual prosecution numbers. “If it really was happening at a huge scale, like some have suggested—so, if there’s thousands, or 10s of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of cases of noncitizen voting, and if the Trump administration is the most aggressive administration in modern U.S. history to try to prosecute this, you’d expect to see a lot of prosecutions, right?” Cover said.

The Justice Department’s authority to criminally prosecute election officials rests partly on federal law that makes it illegal for “an election official” to “knowingly and willfully” deprive residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process, according to Harmeet K. Dhillon, a Justice Department official.

The letter to McGrane represents one front of the administration’s broader effort to reshape election administration nationwide, though its legal strategy faces significant court obstacles. The Idaho case is among dozens pending in federal courts, with mixed results so far for federal claims.

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