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After nearly a week of protests in Los Angeles over the recent sweeping of federal immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, President Trump doubled his administration’s efforts to detain and expel immigrants without documents, claiming it was a key voting bloc in a democratic city.
In a Truth Post Sunday, Trump said Los Angeles and “other such cities will use illegal aliens to expand their voter base, cheate elections, expand welfare states, and diligent American citizens to take good pay and profits.”
But that’s simply not true, according to Los Angeles County election officials.
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“The claim is false, unsupported and only helps to create unfounded concerns and confusion over the election process,” the office of the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorder said in a statement.
The reality is that the county is in place to ensure that only voters get the right to vote, ensuring that all votes are counted accurately, said Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for the county’s registrar recorder office.
How do people become registered voters in California?
California has five requirements that people must meet to register for the ballot, according to the California Secretary of State. To register an individual:
A resident of California. At least 18 years old or older before Election Day. He is currently not serving a state or federal sentence for a felony conviction. Currently, we don’t know that we are mentally incompetent to vote from the court.
If a person meets eligibility criteria, they can register for the vote. This includes being proven under a perjury penalty to meet all eligibility requirements, including being a US citizen and a California resident.
“This statement of oath is a legal declaration and serves as the foundation for the voter registration process,” Sanchez said.
Voting as a non-citizen is a felony that can last up to a year in prison or deportation, Hasen said.
There are several cities in the United States where non-citizens can participate in local elections, including Vermont and Maryland communities, but participation is limited to voting in school boards or city council elections.
In California, San Francisco is the only city that non-citizens can vote, and is limited to the school board.
How does Los Angeles County see who votes in federal elections?
Once voters register, their personal information is verified through the state’s voter registration database. This is done by the last four digits of the state department of the motor vehicle record or the person’s Social Security number, Sanchez said.
Once the verification process is complete, voters do not need to show their identification when voting in person. If no verification occurs, voters must provide their identification when they first vote. Acceptable identification forms include driver’s license, state-issued ID, or passport. The California Secretary has a complete online list of identification documents to bring to the polling station.
Once a polling station is opened for voters in the county, voters must sign a list in front of electoral workers who certify their identity and eligibility.
“Election officials will also implement regular voter role maintenance and check against several data points, including death records from the California Department of Public Health, the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,” the California Secretary told the Times.
For vote-by-vote, the signature of the return envelope is compared to the signature of the voter registration record file, Sanchez said. If the signature is not matched or missing, the voters will be contacted and the opportunity to correct it.
“Only verified votes are accepted and counted,” he said.
Where do undocumented immigrant voting claims come from?
The allegations are that there are many votes on documents and that immigrants who are voted for Democrats have been repeated for years.
There is a species of former flashy racist conspiracy theory called “the great alternative.” According to a poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Service Research, one in three Americans believes that “employment is underway to replace American-born Americans with immigrants for election benefits.”
The theory is gaining momentum under Trump.
In 2016, Trump won election college and presidency, but it wasn’t a popularity vote. It was sent to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton has won around 2.9 million votes.
Trump then argued that without evidence, he would have won the popular vote had the 30-5 million immigrants who lived in the country not voted illegally.
“I think he chose that 3 million numbers to explain his general vote loss because about 3 million votes were the margin he lost his popularity vote,” Hasen said.
When voting by mail came into focus after losing Joe Biden’s re-election bid in 2020, Trump refocused immigrants who lacked permission in his 2024 campaign, and was eventually voted for the White House.
“When Trump and Republicans concluded in 2024 that the attacks on absentee votes were actually hurting them, people didn’t want to vote in person, so the shift went back to immigration,” Hasen said.
According to Hasen, voter fraud claims echoing anyone who is trying to direct a political narrative.
Researchers have repeatedly discovered that there are virtually no fraud carried out by voters in the vote, saying, “According to the Judicial Center, “Even the scale required to ‘rig’ an election is not ‘scal’. Many cases of reported fraud were due to administrative and human error.
“One thing we’ve seen is that people at the end of an election loser tend to be more likely to believe there is a cheating,” Hasen says. “But Donald Trump has really recharged things far beyond what we normally see from a partisan perspective.”
But Trump hasn’t just fueled that theory these days. When he campaigned for Trump last year, billionaire Elon Musk repeated these claims on his social media platform X.
“If Democrats get enough voters to win the election by importing them and giving them free ones, they’ll do,” he posted in September.
So is the number of undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles growing?
Yes, but perhaps it may not be the speed it used to be, said Manuel Pastor, professor of sociology and American studies at USC.
According to the California Institute of Public Policy, the California immigrant population, which increased to 5% (approximately 500,000) between 2010 and 2023, compared to an increase of 14% (127 million) from 2000 to 2010 and 37% (2.4 million) in the 1990s, increased by 5% (approximately 500,000) between 2010 and 2023.
Between 2019 and 2022, the undocumented immigrant population of most states across the country rose steadily. California has declined, according to the Pew Research Center.
Most new immigrants these days go to Florida, Texas and south rather than the high cost of California, the pastor said.
“L.A., more than 70% of undocumented immigrants have been in this country for over a decade,” he said. “They are likely to be part of a long-established employee, parent, and faith institution.”
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