Vice President JD Vance claimed dead people “vote for democrats” while giving an anti-fraud speech in Bangor, Maine, on Thursday.

The Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which President Donald Trump tasked Vance with spearheading, held its inaugural meeting on March 27, 2026. It has been investigating potential schemes for taking advantage of the government.

Vance’s visit to Maine is a pointed one. The state is among the Democratic states — also including Illinois, Minnesota, California, New York and others — the task force has singled out for alleged fraud.

Maine is accused of fraud and mismanagement of federally funded Medicaid programs. A report from earlier this year from the Department of Health and Human Services claimed Maine made “at least $45.6 million in improper fee-for-service Medicaid payments” for services provided to children diagnosed with Autism.

“I realized that fraud isn’t just about saving money,” Vance said in his speech. “It’s not just about protecting the taxpayers. It’s about protecting you, the money you send to the government and the services that you rely on. So, for once, for the first time in a very long time, you’ve got an administration in Washington, D.C., that is fighting for you, fighting to protect your tax dollars and fighting to put the fraudsters in prison, which is where they belong.”

He added that going after fraud is not “hard” because “there is a lot of fraud in the federal government” and “it’s like fishing in a barrel.”

“It is unbelievable, unbelievable, how much you have been fleeced by your own government over the past 15, 20, 30 years,” Vance said. “Nobody, nobody, was looking at this. Nobody was asking difficult questions like, for example, are dead people getting food stamps? Okay? Call me old fashioned. I don’t think the dead people eat, so certainly they don’t need food stamps.”

Someone from the audience called out, “They vote!” referring to accusations made also by Trump that thousands of deceased people voted for former President Joe Biden in states that Trump lost in 2020. In this case, the likely insinuation is that a relative would have filled out a ballot in the deceased relative’s name.

Election experts say that while this occasionally happens, it is not at the scale that would impact the outcome of an election.

“Unfortunately, they vote for Democrats, they don’t vote for us, my friends,” Vance said in a response that solicited laugher from the crowd. “But why is it that we have people who drive Lamborghinis, and that is true, people driving Lamborghinis who are getting low income assistance that’s supposed to go for housing and food for our people? Why is it that we have people in hospice claiming hospice benefits but who have no terminal illnesses?”

Vance continued:

And by the way, here’s the crazy thing, it’s very often it’s not a person who’s even using their own identity. … They’re stealing somebody else’s identity, claiming hospice services, and then when that hard working American goes to apply for some other benefit, they get tagged by the bank as being a fraudster, even though it wasn’t them. It was somebody who had stolen their identity. Who here knows somebody who’s had their identity stolen? Isn’t that a shame? At least half of the hands shot up. And the reason why we have allowed identity theft to fester in this country is because the government wasn’t going after fraud. And ladies and gentlemen, that changed the moment Donald J. Trump became the President of the United States.

Watch above via Fox News.

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