“Get ’Em All”: Ellison’s Warning

When Keith Ellison told fellow Democrats they would “get ’em all” next election, he put words to a deep fight over who controls America’s voter rolls—and who pays the price when Washington gets it wrong.

Story Snapshot

Homeland Security says it found about 250,000 potential non-citizens on voter rolls in four Democratic-led states, plus tens of thousands more elsewhere.
The numbers are based on unverified data matches, with the agency itself calling them “preliminary” and experts warning they likely overstate the problem.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is leading Democratic resistance, arguing Trump-backed rules would jail election workers and block legal voters with strict paperwork demands.
Across studies and state audits, actual non-citizen voting is found to be extremely rare and far too small to change election results.

DHS pushes big numbers, few hard facts

The Department of Homeland Security, led by Secretary Markwayne Mullin, says a review found more than 250,000 “potential non-citizens” registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. The numbers are eye-catching: 190,832 in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada, and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Mullin has also touted an additional 28,000 possible non-citizens in 23 states that use a federal database to check voter rolls. Together, these figures fuel claims that elections are being undermined by illegal registrations.

Officials inside the administration admit these figures are based on broad data matching, not confirmed case-by-case checks. A White House official told reporters the 250,000 estimate came from commercial databases compared with public voter files. That approach can easily confuse long-time citizens with non-citizens who share similar names or old records. Mullin’s own letters to states use cautious language, saying there “may be as many as” those numbers and noting they are from a preliminary review, not a completed audit.

States and experts say the threat is being blown out of proportion

Election officials in the targeted states have pushed back hard. Nevada’s Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said DHS’s numbers are “wildly speculative at best” and that the agency has not shared data to support them. California leaders likewise rejected the claim that nearly 191,000 non-citizens are on their rolls, calling the allegation baseless without evidence. Even in Republican-led states working with DHS, election officials say the lists only flag “possible” non-citizens and that confirmed cases drop sharply after real checks.

Independent research backs up that skepticism. A major review by the Center for Election Innovation and Research found that big claims about non-citizen voting almost always come from misunderstandings or misuses of complex voter data. The Bipartisan Policy Center and other groups have concluded that non-citizen voting occurs in “minuscule numbers” and has never been large enough to change an election result. These findings match years of state audits that routinely shrink scary headline numbers down to a handful of actual cases among millions of voters.

Keith Ellison’s “get ’em all” and the fight over new voting rules

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has become a leading voice against the Trump administration’s election security push. Ellison argues that Trump’s proposed SAVE America Act and related rules would “create substantial barriers to voting” by forcing citizens to show passports or other expensive documents and by threatening election workers with up to five years in prison for paperwork mistakes. In this context, his boast that Democrats will “get ’em all” next election is about mobilizing every legal voter who might be discouraged or blocked by new rules, especially in communities of color and among the poor.

‘They are desperate’: Stacey Abrams slams Mullin over threats against state election officials – MS NOW https://t.co/a59Uile6NM

— Kubi (@KubiR00k) July 20, 2026

Ellison and allied officials point to hard numbers from past audits to make their case. Minnesota’s Secretary of State told DHS that state reviews found only about 0.00028% suspected non-citizen voters. A Georgia audit cited by a multistate letter from California’s attorney general found just 20 non-citizens among 8.2 million voters in 2024. A study of the 2016 election found 30 suspected non-citizen voting cases among 23.5 million votes. These figures suggest that while mistakes do happen, they are rare—and that sweeping crackdowns risk harming far more lawful voters than lawbreakers.

Shared fears: real problems, imperfect systems, and deep mistrust

Federal law already makes it a crime for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, with penalties that can include prison, fines, and deportation. Mullin has highlighted maximum penalties of five years in prison and $250,000 fines, vowing to prosecute both ineligible voters and officials who “look the other way.” For many conservatives, this sounds like long-overdue enforcement after years of loose rules, bad record-keeping, and elite denial of obvious risks. They see non-citizen registrations and dead voters on rolls as proof that the system invites cheating.

Many liberals hear something different: a powerful federal agency using shaky data to threaten local election workers and scare lawful voters, especially immigrants and minorities. They point to the lack of public evidence behind the 250,000 figure, the reliance on flawed databases, and the pattern where big fraud claims collapse under real audits. For both sides, the episode confirms a broader fear—that those in Washington care more about winning and holding power than about building a fair, accurate, and trusted election system.