Eric Eggers has spent years studying voter rolls, mail ballots and election fraud.
His message now: Washington doesn’t need another election cycle to decide whether citizenship belongs at the center of voter-roll maintenance.
Eggers, Vice President of the Government Accountability Institute and author of Fraud: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election, joined OAN’s Riley Lewis to discuss the Trump Administration’s latest election-security push, including a Department of Homeland Security preliminary review that flagged potentially large numbers of noncitizens on voter rolls in four states.
California was the headline number.
DHS told state officials its preliminary review indicated “as many as” 190,832 noncitizens could be registered in California, including 81,336 records the department said produced particularly strong identity matches. DHS has stressed that the findings require additional verification before states take action.
Eggers called that enough to warrant serious scrutiny.
“When a state like New Jersey, who pretends that election integrity is not a real concern, has to admit that they have potentially tens of thousands of noncitizens on their voter rolls, and the DHS has said California has 190,000, like it’s a real problem,” Eggers said.
Eggers says bipartisan agreement is lacking on what he considers a basic eligibility question.
He pointed to the multistate coalition that pursued Meta over alleged harms to children from Instagram, contrasting that cooperation with the partisan fight over election rules.
“Forty-seven different states and 47 different attorneys general all came together,” Eggers said. “But when it comes to actually protecting our elections, Democrats are nowhere to be found.”
Eggers singled out Senate Majority Leader John Thune while borrowing a phrase Lewis had just used in a segment about Democratic Sen. John Fetterman.
“I love the phrase, he’s, quote, ‘chronically disinterested in doing his job,’” Eggers said.
“I’ll take phrases that apply to John Thune for a thousand, Riley.”
Eggers then relayed a conversation he said he had with general counsel for a Republican senator.
“The problem is, you think you have 53 senators, but you don’t,” Eggers recalled being told. “Actually you have about 45 to 47 actual conservatives.”
With legislation stalled, Eggers said the more consequential story may be what the administration is attempting through executive agencies.
DHS has pushed states to compare registration records with federal citizenship and immigration databases and has attached election-security requirements to certain federal grant funding. The administration has also sought major changes to mail-ballot handling through the U.S. Postal Service.
“The Trump Administration said, okay, fine, we can’t get this done in the Senate,” Eggers said. “What can we do to try to ensure confidence in the American elections?”
The Postal Service portion remains tied up in court. A federal judge recently continued blocking key parts of the administration’s proposed mail-voting system, finding that challengers were likely to succeed in arguing that the executive branch lacked authority to impose the changes on states. The administration is appealing.
For Eggers, the current fight is the second chapter of something he watched during Trump’s first term.
Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. It faced multiple lawsuits and state resistance over demands for voter information before Trump dissolved it in January 2018.
The commission never issued a final report.
Eggers believes the administration learned from that experience.
“They have learned their lesson,” he said. “They’re now using the administrative state that they control.”
He predicts the consequences will stretch beyond November.
“I do believe that American elections will look different,” Eggers said, “and that will be one of the most significant parts of Donald Trump’s legacy after he leaves office.”
Watch the clip above.
