President Donald Trump promised $1 million rewards in exchange for reports of voter fraud, ratcheting up his administration’s focus on rooting out alleged election misconduct ahead of the midterms.
“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!” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social.
The White House referred The Washington Sun to Trump’s post when asked specifically about the potential funding source for the rewards and how the administration would authorize any payments.
But Trump’s announcement left election law expert Richard Hasen skeptical.
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“I don’t take him at his word that he would actually do this,” Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The Sun. He predicted in “six months’ time, Trump will try and wiggle out of it and say it was hyperbole.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that he actually won the 2020 election and has cited widespread voter fraud, despite audits and legal challenges failing to substantiate any evidence of misconduct. The president’s allies have previously floated offering cash rewards in exchange for information about confirmed cases of voter fraud, but Monday’s announcement appears to be the first time Trump has personally championed this kind of program.
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.
Hasen noted that there are “small, isolated instances of election fraud” during every election cycle, but he believes the announcement “is 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.”
Trump has made comments casting doubt on the integrity of U.S. election systems on roughly 70% of his days in office since the start of his second term, The New York Times reported earlier this month.
The Trump administration has also made several recent legal moves to crack down on alleged voter fraud and election procedures across the country.
On Oct. 15, the Justice Department sued California to compel the state to check its voter rolls against a list of 20,000 people the Trump administration suspects to be noncitizen voters. The case is currently being reviewed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Justice Department also preemptively sued Alaska last week in an effort to block the certification of the election results if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan does not win. Republicans have asserted that Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher who will also appear on the ballot for the state’s U.S. Senate election, is a Democratic plant who’s only running to confuse voters.
“He’s really grasping at straws,” Hasen said. “The fact that the DOJ filed what I consider to be the weakest election law complaint I’ve seen in Alaska at Trump’s behest, so he claims, I mean that tells you, I think, all you need to know about how they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Aside from alleged voter fraud, fighting suspected fraud in federal programs has become a key focus for the Trump administration. The Justice Department authorized a pilot program through its National Fraud Enforcement Division earlier this month offering up to $30,000 in exchange for qualifying tips about financial misconduct in certain government programs.
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