Ryan Reilly for NBC News:

Election law expert Rick Hasen told NBC News on Thursday that the 57 referrals that DOGE reportedly made to the Justice Department involving resident aliens who were allegedly registered to vote are a “drop in the ocean,” and noted that potential unlawful voter registrations were different from ballots being cast.

As NBC News reported this morning, longtime Elon Musk advisor Antonio Gracias told reporters that DOGE has referred 57 cases of voter fraud to the Justice Department, saying the individuals referred were “resident aliens who were registered to vote and may or may not have voted in elections.”

“We’re not sure,” Gracias said. “We referred the cases.”…

More than 155 million votes were cast in the 2024 election, and Hasen said that individuals sometimes inadvertently get registered to vote who are not eligible, sometimes during visits to the Department of Motor Vehicles, since some states give voters a registration opportunity when they sign up for or renew their driver’s license.

“Sometimes either a worker at the motor vehicles department or the person looking at one of those little screens hits the wrong button, makes a mistake, and inadvertently gets registered to vote. So those things happen,” he said.

Hasen said there are “very rare cases” of non-citizens who attempt to vote, and that it makes sense that so few non-citizens knowingly attempt to cast unlawful ballots because there’s no concrete benefit to casting a single vote and the penalties are so dire.

“Very few cases are found, and the reason for that is unsurprising. If you’re not a citizen and you register to vote and you vote intentionally, that could affect your immigration status, you could go to jail,” he said. “People sign under penalty of perjury when they do these things that they are eligible to vote, and given that one vote is very unlikely to change the outcome of an election, there’s very little incentive to risk breaking the law.”

“So you know, this is like a drop in the ocean, and it would not surprise me if, after we look at these 57 cases, that there are none or few people who are ineligible, who intentionally and affirmatively try to register to vote, right? And even so, 57 people out of how many, how many 10s of millions of people in this database?”…

“If this is the best that DOGE and the Trump administration can do in ferreting out voter fraud, there are not going to be any more effective this time around than they were during Trump 1,” he said….