“Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!” President Donald Trump announced Monday on Truth Social. The characteristically informal social media announcement left readers with many questions: how and by whom would tipsters be paid? If by the government, by what specific authority? And is this really a problem?

The last of these questions is easiest to answer, for the answer is an unfortunate but obvious “yes.”

Exhibit A hails, unsurprisingly, from California. On Monday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit denied a request by the Trump administration to order the state to sequester 20,000 ballots the Trump administration alleges are from noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. Sequestering the ballots would require holding them in a separate pile until their legal status can be sorted out. If the state leaves the ballots unsequestered and counts them, there is no way to go back later and undo those votes, even if the Trump administration later proves that the ballots were illegitimately cast by noncitizens.

The dispute raises another question: are there noncitizens on California’s voter rolls? Once again, the answer is unfortunately “yes.” Last year, Orange County, Calif. notified the federal government that it had removed 17 noncitizens from its voter rolls. The county investigated after noncitizens complained that they received ballots (in California’s universal mail-in system), even though they knew they shouldn’t be registered to vote.

Thank goodness there were such scrupulous law-abiding noncitizens in Orange County, but it would be naïve to trust that every member of the class is just as honest. Furthermore, the problem of noncitizens being mistakenly registered is likely smaller in Orange County than in counties with much larger populations, such as Los Angeles County; many other California counties did not do a similar investigation to remove noncitizens.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice highlighted a similar though smaller problem in Washington state, calling on election officials there to sequester “ballots cast by more than 400 people who appear to be illegally registered to vote.”

“Many of those on the list provided to the state are lawful permanent residents (LPRs), or ‘green card’ holders. Although LPRs have legal immigration status in the United States, they are not U.S. citizens and are not permitted to vote in U.S. elections,” the DOJ said in a press release. “We have heard from green card holders who were registered against their knowledge via the Washington Motor Voter program. Then they receive a ballot in the mail and assume they are legally registered — that simply is not the case.”

California and Washington are both deep blue states, and a handful of illegitimate ballots is not likely to sway a statewide election. However, there are some more local races (even congressional seats) where the margins are much tighter, and a small number of illegitimate ballots could decide the outcome.

The stakes are even higher in Wisconsin, which has proven to be a pivotal swing state in the last three presidential elections. Earlier this month, the Wisconsin Elections Commission unanimously ruled that none of the state’s 1,800 municipal election clerks may cross-check their voter data against the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to weed out noncitizens. According to the commission, lawmakers would need to amend a state law prohibiting any sharing of sensitive voter data to permit such inter-governmental checking.

Thus far, 29 states and the District of Columbia have reportedly begun to use the SAVE database, but that still leaves 21 states that aren’t using federal citizenship data to cross-check their voter rolls.

These election irregularities are less egregious than those that plagued the election of 2020. Still, a substantial number of states have adopted an apathetic attitude toward ensuring the accuracy of their voter rolls, particularly when it comes to noncitizens.

This should concern every American citizen, whose legal right to vote is diluted by illegal voting. President Trump’s election fraud bounty is one effort to deter such illegal voting. A DOJ poll-watching initiative is another. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to send out some 1,000 poll monitors on Election Day, according to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division.

“It is no different than in Democratic administrations,” Dhillon declared. DOJ poll monitoring has been a bipartisan tradition, but the Trump administration’s small legion of poll watchers is nearly thrice as large as the 388 monitors deployed by the Biden administration in 2022.

Of course, poll monitors cannot solve every problem with election integrity. They cannot detect fraud committed in ballots turned in by mail.

Poll monitors also cannot address the increasing electronic dangers. This month, Anthropic’s Claude AI evaded a paywall to access information from a Georgia voter database (fortunately the stakes for the breach were insignificant). And on Monday, hackers targeted the U.S. Federal Election Commission’s website, disrupting its electronic filing system. By well into Tuesday, the system where campaigns file required financial reports was still offline.

It seems no coincidence that the hack came in the week preceding U.S. Election Day. As America’s elections continue to face the same old threats of fraudulent ballot-casting, it now faces increasing new challenges in cyberspace. If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, Americans in this election cycle must remain as vigilant as ever against threats to fair elections.