The Claim Being Tested
The Old Goat's starting claim was blunt: the federal pressure on the midterms is aimed at blue and swing states. A claim like that is easy to believe and easy to get wrong, so the Old Goat built the table first and the argument second. Part of the claim did not survive. A narrower version did, and it is the more troubling of the two.
The First Knock: Everyone Who Said No
REPORTED. The Justice Department asked nearly every state for its full voter file, including driver's license and partial Social Security numbers. It then sued 30 states and the District of Columbia that would not hand it over. By the trackers kept by CBS News, the Brennan Center and ProPublica, it has lost 26 of those cases and won none. Four are pending (Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Utah). Oklahoma settled by turning over its list. The Sixth Circuit upheld the loss in Michigan, writing that the government "invokes Title III for an inverse purpose — to ensure that some people have not voted." ProPublica →
Sorted by the party of each state's secretary of state (the Old Goat's chosen measure; in a few states a board or commission actually runs elections), the sued states break down like this:
| Group | States | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Sued, Democratic secretary of state | AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, NV, NJ, NM, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA, WI (+ DC) | 21 + DC |
| Sued, Republican secretary of state | GA, ID, KY, NH, OK, PA (Al Schmidt, appointed by a Democratic governor), UT, VA (filed Jan. 16, 2026, while Youngkin appointee Susan Beals was elections commissioner), WV | 9 |
| Gave a full voter file voluntarily | AL, AK, AR, FL, IN, IA, LA, MS, NE, OH, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, WY | 16, all Republican-run |
DOCUMENTED, from the Old Goat's own count of the trackers above. That table kills the simple version of the claim. Republican-run Utah, Kentucky, West Virginia, Idaho, Georgia and New Hampshire said no and were sued like anyone else. Refusal mostly followed party: all 16 states that handed over full files are Republican-run, and 21 of the 30 sued states have Democratic secretaries of state. Six of the seven 2024 swing states were sued (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin); North Carolina was not.
REPORTED. The edges are where it gets interesting. Not every state that held back was sued. Montana, Republican-run, sent a file with only partial Social Security numbers (Brennan Center); the Justice Department's own website says Montana "cooperated and provided them," and Montana's secretary of state later said only the public list went over (Democracy Docket). Montana was not sued. Kansas's August 2025 letter offered "publicly available voter data," and a department lawyer later told a court Kansas had "complied voluntarily"; accounts differ on whether Kansas sent more afterward. Missouri's Republican secretary of state told legislators in February he would not provide an unredacted list without a court order (NCSL), and Missouri has not been sued, though one tracker lists it as having provided data. On the other side of the line, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon and Pennsylvania all offered their public files or partial exports and were sued for the rest. INFERENCE: the line between "cooperating" and "defendant" was not drawn by what a state handed over alone.
The Second Knock
A lawsuit is a civil argument in front of a judge, and the department keeps losing it. What came after the lawsuits is different in kind: public accusations, a criminal search warrant, a request that a court stop ballots from being counted, and talk of prison. This is where the pattern shows.
| Date | Where | What |
|---|---|---|
| Jan. 28 | Fulton County, Ga. (Democratic county, swing state) | FBI executes criminal search warrant, takes roughly 700 boxes of 2020 ballots and records. CBS reports about 260 FBI analysts were later assigned to them. NPR found the affidavit left out state findings that undercut its claims. REPORTED. |
| July 16–17 | California, New Jersey, Nevada, Pennsylvania (four Democratic governors; Pennsylvania's secretary is a Republican appointee) | DHS letters say a "preliminary review" found there "may be as many as" 190,832, 35,152, 15,903 and 14,576 noncitizens registered. Secretary Mullin drops the hedge in public: "We've identified 250,000." DOCUMENTED (DHS release). |
| July–Aug. | Primary monitors: Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Virginia (Fairfax and Prince William counties); Florida and Wyoming added Aug. 18 | DOJ says it monitored 11 states in all; the Old Goat found eight named. Wyoming's Republican governor called the monitors in Laramie County "aggressive" and "irregular." REPORTED. |
| Sept. 4 | Utah (Republican) | Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson told in writing she is under federal investigation, after a July warning of criminal liability for refusing the voter file. REPORTED. |
| Oct. 13–16 | California, Los Angeles County | Thumb drive of about 20,000 "likely noncitizens" with a 48-hour deadline; suit filed Oct. 15 asking a court to stop those mail ballots from being counted (U.S. v. California, No. 2:26-cv-12025); Oct. 16 letter from acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter says officials who count them "risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime." Trump reposts it: "They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!" REPORTED. |
Three of the five rows point squarely at Democratic-governed states or a Democratic county in a swing state: Fulton County, the four DHS letters and California. The monitors are mixed; most of the named primary sites were in Democratic-run states, but Florida and Wyoming were on the list too, and Wyoming's own Republican governor complained about them. Utah is the exception, and it is the exception that fits the rule: Henderson is a Republican who refused.
The Baseline, Honestly
INFERENCE. Before calling that targeting, the Old Goat has to ask what the pattern would look like with no targeting at all. If 21 of the 30 refusers are Democratic-run, then escalations against refusers will mostly land on Democratic states by arithmetic alone. That is a fair objection and the Old Goat is not waving it away.
REPORTED. The obvious contrast does not hold up as well as the Old Goat first thought. DHS sent its public noncitizen counts only to four states with Democratic governors, and its stated reason is that those four had not used its SAVE verification system. Texas ran its entire roll through SAVE and flagged about 2,000 possible noncitizens on its own (PolitiFact, NCSL), and Florida's SAVE access was restored by a court in July (NCSL). That reason plausibly covers both. The Justice Department dataset that ICE's investigators ingested "may include" the Republican states' full files, per CNN; the Old Goat found no published DHS count for any of them, which means none was found, not that none exists. An election-data expert quoted by PolitiFact, citing a White House official, said the four-state counts were built from commercial data without license or Social Security identifiers.
What survives the baseline is the Nevada and Pennsylvania record, and the Montana line above.
The second is what happened to the counts once someone checked. REPORTED. In Nevada, DHS narrowed the work to 185 people it said had been manually reviewed. Nevada's chief deputy secretary of state wrote back: "As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens. You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise." DHS declined to share names, birth dates or addresses so the state could check, and maintains that the 185 were confirmed; it says more than 14,000 Nevada names remain under review. In Pennsylvania, Secretary Schmidt says DHS officials told him on Aug. 13 they lacked "high confidence" in the 14,576 figure; DHS calls that a mischaracterization. Either way, the number went out first and the checking came after. Who Holds the Rolls →
What the Courts Have Said
- Voter-roll suits: 26 losses, 0 wins, before judges appointed by Trump, Bush, Clinton, Obama and Biden. REPORTED.
- Mail-ballot order (March 31, 2026): REPORTED: on Aug. 24 the Supreme Court, 6-3, lifted Judge Indira Talwani's first injunction as premature, and once the Postal Service rule was final, she blocked it again. DOCUMENTED: on Sept. 14 the Court refused to lift that one, in an unsigned order: "The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits." Justice Kavanaugh concurred; Justices Alito and Thomas dissented (No. 26A305). DOCUMENTED.
- SAVE database: On Sept. 25 the Court stayed Judge Sparkle Sooknanan's June order against the rebuilt SAVE system, over the dissent of Justices Jackson, Sotomayor and Kagan (No. 26A308). DOCUMENTED. On Oct. 9 the same judge, in a separate case, vacated the Justice Department's nationwide voter-list policy; the department asked her to pause that ruling on Oct. 16, and the Old Goat found no ruling on the request yet. REPORTED.
- Proof of citizenship (March 2025 order, EO 14248): Its proof-of-citizenship sections have been permanently blocked in two federal courts. REPORTED.
- State citizenship lists: The March 2026 order set a Sept. 4 deadline to send them; NPR reported the administration would miss it, and the Old Goat found no state confirming it received one. REPORTED.
What the President Said
REPORTED. On Feb. 2, in an interview with Dan Bongino, Trump said Republicans should "nationalize" and "take over" the voting in at least 15 places. "We have states that are so crooked and they're counting votes. We have states that I won that show I didn't win." He named none. The White House said he wants Congress to pass the SAVE Act and a uniform photo-ID standard.
INFERENCE. "States that I won that show I didn't win" most plausibly means the places he lost in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. All six were sued in 2026. Three of them got the second knock (Georgia's Fulton County seizure, and the DHS letters to Nevada and Pennsylvania), and two more, Arizona and Michigan, got primary monitors.
The Other Side of the Ledger
REPORTED. Noncitizen voting is a real federal crime and it does happen, in small numbers. The Justice Department has charged about 90 people with election offenses this year, about 50 of them for voting as noncitizens, per the Associated Press; CBS counts more than 100 noncitizens charged since January 2025. Iowa, checking its own rolls, found 277 possible noncitizen registrants, 35 of whom voted in 2024. Ohio referred 597, of whom 138 voted. Those are Republican-run states finding real cases on their own, with their own records, before anyone held a press conference. That is what checking looks like. It produced hundreds, not a quarter of a million.
What the Old Goat Thinks It Means
This part is opinion. The first knock was for everyone, and the courts answered it 26 times. The second knock is where the choices are made, and the choices so far run one way: announce big numbers about states with Democratic governors, seize ballots in a Democratic county, ask a judge not to count ballots in the largest Democratic state, and repost a promise of prison for the clerks who count them. None of it has to win in court to work. A number that says 250,000 and later turns into 185 disputed names has already done its job if people remember the first figure on Nov. 4.
The lawsuits are the paperwork. The press release is the product.
The Old Goat would rather be wrong about this. The way to show it is simple: give Nevada the names, birth dates and addresses behind the 185 so the state can check them, give Pennsylvania the method behind the 14,576, and explain in writing why Montana's partial file was cooperation and Michigan's public file was a lawsuit. If any of that comes out, this page gets updated with it. The Old Goat's dashboard carries the rest of the election-window tracking, and Ask Someone Who'd Know → covers how the 250,000 figure first went out.