Shapiro says Trump’s claims of widespread noncitizen voting are ‘not connected to reality’

Gov. Josh Shapiro blasted President Donald Trump Friday morning, a day after the president used a prime-time speech to reignite a series of conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss that intelligence and voting experts have both warned are based on misrepresentations and falsehoods.

“It was an unfortunate day for America to have really an unhinged president in the White House spewing a whole bunch of conspiracy theories that are just simply not connected to reality,” Shapiro said on MS NOW’s Morning Joe Friday morning.

The speech comes less than four months ahead of the November election, which will determine control of Congress and the Pennsylvania governor’s office. As Trump administration looks to usher in sweeping national changes to election administration, Shapiro and other Democrats have promised to continue resisting those efforts.

Shapiro, a potential Democratic contender for the presidency in 2028, noted his role in battling Trump’s team in court as Pennsylvania attorney general in the aftermath of the 2020 election — which Trump continues to insist he won, without evidence, six years later.

“I went 43-0,” Shapiro said, calling Trump’s assertions baseless.

While the president did not directly reference Pennsylvania in the speech, the White House did target the state — along with New Jersey, California, and Nevada — in a document it posted online Thursday evening in support of the president’s claims.

The document claims that the Department of Homeland Security has identified more than 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote spread across the four Democratic-led states, but it provides little explanation of the methodology used.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican appointed by Shapiro, rejected the allegation in a statement.

“Pennsylvania follows all state and federal laws when it comes to our elections, and our voter rolls are properly maintained and updated,” Schmidt said in a statement Thursday. “All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”

The assertions, which Trump said were made in concert with the nation’s top intelligence agency chiefs, are included in memos on the White House homepage that together weave broad allegations of fraud surrounding the 2020 presidential election that remain unproven despite multiple audits and investigations six years later.

“These disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible,” Trump said Thursday.

But none of memos show evidence that would change the outcome of the election and a broad range experts have pointed that some contain information that undercut Trump’s claims.

The document targeting Pennsylvania and New Jersey is a one-page summary of a Department of Homeland Security investigation, which the White House says identified, a total of 278,000 noncitizens across the country who are registered to vote in federal elections.

The White House document suggests the number was derived from putting voter files through the federal government’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) tool, which has previously been used to further false claims of widespread voter fraud.

“While the Department has made clear that we cannot share Pennsylvanians’ private, personal information, we welcome DHS sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims,” Schmidt said in the statement.

The announcement also comes as Pennsylvania and other states have pushed back against requests from the Department of Justice to hand over unredacted voter rolls. Schmidt has argued that sharing the rolls would put voters’ personal information at risk.

The Trump administration has insisted doing so is the best way to avoid criminal prosecution for “aiding and abetting the violation” of federal voting laws.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said 23 states already work with the department to screen for noncitizen voters, in a news conference Friday, and those who continue to resist could face legal consequences.

States that want to be reimbursed for the cost of running federal elections must implement the department’s requests, he said.

“We will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states, and hold the election officials accountable,” Mullin said. “If the election officials — once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections — chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even depending on how far it goes, prison time.”

But funding from the federal government to run elections “is modest at best and neither reliable nor consistent,” according to the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Schmidt, who investigated noncitizen voting in his previous role as Philadelphia’s Republican city commissioner, has repeatedly rebuffed the department’s demands and said it is extremely rare for noncitizens to vote and already prohibited by state law.

There have been only 77 instances of noncitizens voting in the entire United States between 1999 and 2023, according to an analysis from the Bipartisan Policy Center, and authorities investigated in each instance.

To vote in Pennsylvania, you must be a U.S. citizen, a resident of the state for 30 days, and 18 years old by Election Day. Registration must be done 15 days prior to an election.

There are three main ways to register: online, via a paper form handed into a county board of elections, or at PennDot or another state agency. Some people register when obtaining a driver’s license, if eligible, or after a naturalization ceremony.

But the SAVE system doesn’t always catch up with those changes, said Ben Geffen, a senior attorney at the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia who reviews elections. That means, results might show “false positives” that evaporate upon “even a little bit of investigation” into individual circumstances.

Pennsylvania will be crucial in determining control of the House with four swing districts being targeted by both parties, meaning that the state’s election is likely to fall under the microscope as they repeatedly have since the 2020 election when Trump sought to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

“We are prepared here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to once again have a free and fair, safe and secure election,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro said he trusts Schmidt, a Republican, “because we believe here in Pennsylvania the administration of elections is nonpartisan.”

In 2017, Schmidt, then a Philadelphia city commissioner, identified a glitch in PennDot’s system that had allowed 168 noncitizens to register to vote in the city, and likely a couple hundred statewide.

The voter rolls were updated in 2018, Geffen said, so none of the glitches would have impacted the 2020 election or any beyond.

A 2026 audit from Pennsylvania Auditor General Timothy DeFoor, a Republican, found that just one noncitizen was improperly registered to vote at PennDot due to human error. The individual never cast a ballot.

New Jersey has also fought against the full release of its voter rolls.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill joined other Democratic governors in calling Trump’s speech “alarming” in a statement issued Thursday.

“Democratic governors stand ready to fight back against the Trump administration and stop any and all unlawful attacks on every American’s constitutional right to vote,” said the statement from the Democratic Governors Association.

Sen. Andy Kim, (D., N.J.) referred to Trump’s address as “25 minutes of conspiracy theories from a man who still can’t get over 2020” in a post on X.

Trump also used the speech, which was not carried live on ABC, NBC, or CNN, to advocate for the SAVE Act, the elections bill that would require people to prove that they are U.S. citizens when registering to vote.

“Addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act,” Trump said. “How easy is that to do unless you want to cheat?”

The legislation, which has stalled in Congress, is unpopular among Democrats and even some Republicans. Among the concerns that have been raised from opponents is that it could block married people who take their spouse’s surname from registering to vote because of the mismatch with their birth certificates.

Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) urged passage of the bill on social media Thursday, but he did not respond to a question Friday about the Trump administration’s claims about noncitizen voting in Pennsylvania.

But as November approaches, another Pennsylvania Republican, Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, said voters can be sure their votes will be counted accurately.

“Prior to every election, we conduct logic and accuracy testing on every piece of equipment that is used for the election,” said Bluestein, the sole Republican on the three-member board that oversees Philadelphia elections.

“Voters, when they cast their ballots, have a verifiable paper ballot for every single vote that gets cast, and then after the election, we conduct two audits of a random sampling of ballots to verify that they were tabulated accurately,” he said.