The facts
The U.S. Department of Justice indicted ten individuals in Minnesota on charges of making false citizenship claims to vote or voting as noncitizens in the 2022, 2024 general elections and 2026 primaries. Attorney General Todd Blanche and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the case was the sixth such announcement this month. Blanche told reporters, “Elections today are often decided by a small number of votes and that’s why these investigations and prosecutions matter.” The defendants are lawful permanent residents; at least three have pleaded not guilty. Since early September, the DOJ has charged at least 24 people across ten states with similar offenses. The Bipartisan Policy Center reports federal citizenship‑verification tools flag noncitizens in about 0.04 % of cases, and a Center for Election Innovation & Research study notes that broad allegations about noncitizen voting often stem from misunderstandings or mischaracterizations of voter data.
Our take
Well, shit. The Justice Department finally decided to make a big splash over ten Minnesotans accused of voting while not citizens. That’s a full ten people in a state of millions of voters – a number so tiny it could barely tip the scales of a high‑school student council election. Blanche and Mullin are trumpeting this as the sixth announcement this month, as if each indictment is a seismic event reshaping American democracy. The reality? Federal tools catch noncitizens in just 0.04 % of verification cases – a rounding error, not a tidal wave. New Jersey’s recent registration glitch that mistakenly listed over 6,000 noncitizens, with fewer than 340 actually voting, shows the true scale of the problem: minuscule and often administrative. Yet the DOJ is spending resources and political capital to chase a handful of permanent‑resident “mistakes,” turning a statistical blip into a headline‑grabbing crusade. It’s a performance designed to feed a narrative of rampant fraud, while the data tells a very different story. The only fraud here is the one being sold to the public – a manufactured crisis to keep a base angry and distracted. Fucking pathetic, transparent, and utterly disproportionate.
