After months of ignoring the cost-of-living crisis, President Donald Trump has a novel plan to help struggling Americans: find some voter fraud. “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!” the president wrote Monday afternoon on Truth Social.
Let’s be clear up front: It is highly unlikely that anybody will be collecting on this bounty anytime soon. At best, it is another desperate attempt from Trump to win over voters by throwing free money at them. But the gambit combines with the administration’s other preemptive efforts to muddy the midterm results in a far more concerning way.
In typically Trumpian fashion, the details of such a potentially consequential policy are basically nonexistent. “I’m also going to be issuing a $1 million bonus or reward, or whatever you want to call it, for anybody that reports voter fraud, leading to the arrest and conviction of somebody,” Trump told reporters a few hours after posting. “We’re giving that person $1 million.”
Let’s be clear up front: It is highly unlikely that anybody will be collecting on this bounty anytime soon.
From where will this, in theory, one or more million dollars be drawn? No idea, because as The Washington Sun noted, the “current Republican-led Congress has not yet authorized any sort of funding pool for a voter-fraud reporting rewards initiative, and if Democrats take back either chamber, it’s unlikely that a program would be authorized.” Election expert Rick Hasen told the Sun that the initiative is likely “part of a larger project on the part of Donald Trump to generate distrust of the election system by touting election fraud as some kind of problem.”
Voter fraud itself is exceedingly rare, as experts have shouted repeatedly for years. Trump and his allies falsely claim that Democrats have orchestrated en masse voting by noncitizens. They’ve never provided any proof. In 2020, Trump’s own campaign even paid more than $600,000 to have an outside group verify many of his claims, only for the group to debunk them.
Despite that, MAGA supporters yet again are leaning hard on the false narrative that noncitizen voting threatens the integrity of the midterms. The Department of Justice has already ordered Washington and California to set aside ballots from an administration-compiled list of noncitizens it claims “with a high level of confidence, have voted in elections.”
The Department of Homeland Security meanwhile claimed in July, without proof, that nearly 250,000 “potential” noncitzens were registered to vote in four states, with 16,000 on voter rolls in Nevada alone. (By August, MS NOW reported, it had only identified 185 potential noncitizens on the state’s rolls.)
Despite all that, MAGA supporters hearing Trump’s call may still think it will be easy to say they’ve spotted voter fraud in hopes of collecting the promised riches. But the fine print is important here, as Trump has stressed that a conviction on voter fraud charges is needed to cash in on the reward. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation has only identified 1,300 criminal convictions on voter fraud charges dating back to 1982 out of hundreds of millions of ballots cast in the interim.
I must admit though that there’s some twisted genius about Trump’s scam.
The GOP has had chance after chance to stop lying about voter fraud but instead continues to play upon its supporters’ fears, potentially casting doubt upon their own elections in the process. As I wrote more than three years ago, “Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories have become folded into Republican orthodoxy.” Playing along with the war on noncitizen voting gives credence to his claims that democracy is broken in a way that will be hard to recover from in the long term.
I must admit though that there’s some twisted genius about Trump’s scam. He is offering a fictional reward for reporting a fictional crime spree. There’s no money to give out, but that’s fine — there’s no way that a noncitizen winds up being convicted based on a tip that would warrant this payout. (If anything, recent history shows there’s a better chance someone is caught committing election fraud on behalf of a Republican than a noncitizen be convicted of voting.)
It could get more civilians on the lookout at polling centers. Some may even delude themselves into turning in their neighbors based on false claims in hopes of cashing in — but there’s no payday waiting.
The post Trump’s $1 million voter fraud bounty won’t pay out — but may pay off for him appeared first on MS NOW.
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