Cinema News: Are voter rolls a scam for cheating?

June 11, 2026 | View in browser

By Anita Chabria

Columnist

This is Times columnist Anita Chabria, coming to you with a bit of sincere if unexpected gratitude.

Thank you, Steve Hilton, for calling out President Trump for the liar he is.

Hilton on Tuesday addressed the president’s unfounded but vociferous claims that Democrats have massively cheated in our recent election.

“We’ve got teams standing by, we’ve got lawyers standing by, very focused on that,” Hilton told reporters, including my colleague Seema Mehta, outside the L.A. elections headquarters. “We don’t want to let anyone down, we don’t want to let anything slip away, and we’ve seen nothing.”

We’ve. Seen. Nothing.

How refreshing to have a MAGA insider repudiate the lies.

If only more RITOs (Republicans in Trump Only) would follow suit. But, alas, the conspiracies rage on, aided and abetted by L.A.’s own First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, who recently told right-wing commentator Glenn Beck (among others) that he expected his office to charge people in voter fraud cases in coming months.

“But we need a wide-scale audit of the California voter roll,” Essayli told Beck.

Voter rolls are a huge refrain in conspiracy theories and the subject of numerous (mostly unsucessful) lawsuits by Trump’s Department of Justice. Trump is demanding that the federal government “audit” the voter rolls to ensure ballots go only to legal voters, which is one of those scary and ill-conceived ideas that sounds reasonable on the surface.

Trump’s lawyers, some of whom made careers out of civil lawsuits around voter conspiracy allegations before being appointed to office, claim untold thousands of ballots are sent out erroneously, then somehow, via Democrats, land in the hands of undocumented immigrants and others who use them to vote illegally.

It is nonsense, but also now government-backed nonsense.

“It certainly is a new level of danger that the people who spent unlimited amounts of time and money trying to prove that the 2020 election was stolen are now leading and staffing the Department of Justice,” Eileen O’Connor told me. She’s a senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, a nonpartisan effort to protect democracy.

“There have just been people who have spent every waking moment of their lives, practically for decades now, searching for all of this voter fraud that they claim is happening and not finding it,” O’Connor said. “And they’re still failing to find it.”

So what’s the deal with voter rolls? Are they really the dark heart of a Democratic scam to rig elections? Or is the scam that Trump and MAGA are attempting to use the boring and bureaucratic nature of voting rolls to do the very thing they claim to be fighting — undermine of free and fair elections?

What the heck is a voter roll?

Voter rolls are the lists of eligible voters kept by each state.

States run elections, because, well, the Constitution. But that structure is also a good idea because states keep closer track of who is a legal resident and where they are than the federal government.

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Those like O’Connor who care about democracy and fair elections point out federal meddling with an “audit” of these lists is vastly overstepping federal power — and likely will knock of numerous voters who have a right to cast a ballot.

Part of that is because voter rolls are “loose,” according to Chris Fowler, a professor of geography and demographics at Penn State who specializes in voting rights. Most states have laws that strive to be inclusive and are slow to remove people from the lists, precisely because we want as many people to vote as we can get.

Some people in California are added when they get a driver’s license. Some people move and ask the postal service to update their voter registration. Some people register once, move dozens of times and never think to tell their secretary of state.

Some people die. Some people get married and change their name. Some people don’t vote for 10 years, then do. You get the idea. Life happens, and updating voter registration is rarely our first thought.

And yes, there are cases of folks illegally getting onto voter rolls, such as one Essayli recently pointed to in which a signature gatherer was paying folks on Skid Row to register to vote. The key there being register, not actually vote.

One-off cases like this should be and are prosecuted, but the inclusive nature of the rolls is by design, not a flaw.

“They’re imperfect,” Fowler said.

Why not audit?

Fowler added, though, if someone wants to make a big stink about fraud without any actual evidence, that inaccuracy is the perfect sleight of hand. To the average person, it sounds bad that we can’t keep a clean list of eligible voters.

But here’s what the conspiracy folks leave out: Being on the voter roll doesn’t automatically mean a vote will be counted or even that a ballot will be sent. It’s just the starting point of everyone who might be invited to the party.

There are numerous safeguards, such as signature verification, that cast ballots go through before the vote is considered legitimate. When there is doubt, the vote is “cured,” which is an unnecessarily convoluted way of saying local election officials may go as far as tracking down the actual voter and making sure they are legit. Yes, if there is a question, actual people contact an actual voter. If they can’t get in contact, the vote is usually set aside.

The MAGA demand to audit voter rolls ignores all this reality and is instead based on the false idea that voter rolls translate directly into counted votes.

The game MAGA is running with voter roll audits is that it was never about election integrity. It’s about suppressing the vote of Black people, brown people, young people and others who tend to vote Democratic and also tend to have more unsettled lives that would lead them to have inaccurate information, such as conflicting addresses, on the voter rolls.

Federal audits would, instead of protecting elections, allow a conspiracy theory to be weaponized into a way to keep legal voters from casting their ballot. Call it the new Jim Crow — a disingenuous way to suppress certain votes all gussied up as safety.

But the effort creates a win-win for Trump. If his Department of Justice is successful in getting state voter rolls — which it has been in more than a dozen states that have voluntarily turned them over — they can demand as many names as they want be removed.

The federal government has not said what criteria it will use to “clean” these rolls, who will be in charge, how the information will be used or kept, or how people will even know they’ve been knocked off until they try to vote. There is even concern the information gathered from audits will be used for other purposes, such as immigration enforcement or surveillance activities.

And for the many states such as California who are fighting the demand in courts — the DOJ lost its California case and has appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — MAGA is simply screaming that the mere fact of protecting these lists from federal interference is proof that we’re covering up this vast conspiracy.

“It is part of laying the groundwork to just be able to say either we have all these voter rolls and we’ve analyzed them and they’re full of errors, or to be able to say, ‘Oh, you didn’t hand over the voter rolls. What are you hiding?’ O’Connor said.

None of that is actually good for elections, or democracy. That’s the real scam with voter roll audits.

They are a Trumped-up attempt to make us doubt a system that is working just as designed, imperfectly and inclusively, protecting democracy while encouraging legal voters to participate.