Noncitizen voting isn’t an issue in federal elections, regardless of conspiracy theories. Here’s why
Former President Donald Trump on Friday focused on one of his favorite themes: the specter of immigrants improperly voting in federal elections. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson arrived at the former president’s Florida complex to announce he would introduce a bill to prevent those who are not citizens from voting in elections.
Trump has made baseless claims on the subject before, such as in 2016, when he attributed his loss of the popular vote to immigrant voting and subsequently appointed a commission to investigate the issue. It was dissolved without identifying a single instance in which a non-citizen cast a vote.
He and other Republicans have recently stepped up their conspiratorial claims on the issue of the influx of migrants across the southern border under Biden, claiming Democrats are letting them in to add them to the voter rolls.
The theory involves two complicated topics, immigration and voting, but is actually very simple. There is no evidence that non-citizens will vote in significant numbers in federal elections, or that they will do so in the future. It’s already a crime if they do that. And we know it’s not a danger because several states have examined their registries and found very few non-citizen voters.
To be clear, there have been cases of non-citizens casting ballots, but these are extremely rare. Those who have investigated these cases say they often involve legal immigrants who mistakenly believe they have the right to vote.
Johnson tried to address this by saying that “we cannot wait for widespread fraud to occur.” But an earlier crackdown on alleged voting by non-citizens had also risked thousands of actual citizens being removed from voting lists.
This is why non-citizen voting poses no real threat to the integrity of federal elections and the risks of changing federal law.
Federal law requires all voter registration forms to inform those who register that they must swear under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens. That has generally worked. Immigrants who are not citizens in particular do not want to break the law because this could jeopardize their ability to stay in the country or become citizens.
Some Republicans have long complained that federal laws do not require additional checks on voter eligibility. Johnson promised to introduce legislation requiring proof of citizenship before anyone can register to vote, but he provided no further details. Such legislation is unlikely to survive the Democratic-controlled Senate, and its main impact would be to be used as a talking point against Democrats during the campaign.
One reason Democrats are wary is that when Texas tried to root out noncitizen voters in 2019, the effort wrongly made tens of thousands of U.S. citizens ineligible to vote. A federal judge banned Texas from implementing the law and the then-secretary of state resigned.
That shows the risks of adding new identification checks to detect something that happens very rarely.
All available evidence shows that non-citizen voting in federal elections is incredibly rare. It is illegal for people who are not U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections, but it is legal for them to vote in local elections if the jurisdiction allows it. A small number of local jurisdictions, such as San Francisco and the District of Columbia, allow immigrants who have not become U.S. citizens to vote on school board and city council races.
Let’s look at some conservative-leaning states to see if non-citizen voting is a problem. First, we are talking about voting by “non-citizens,” not voting by immigrants. That’s because some immigrants have become naturalized U.S. citizens and, under the Constitution, have the same voting rights as those born here.
In 2016, North Carolina audited its elections to ensure no one voted improperly. It showed that 41 legal immigrants who had not yet become citizens had cast their votes. That’s 4.8 million votes cast. According to the state election board, those illegal votes made no difference in a single election in the state, even in the smallest local race. Trump’s Justice Department later filed criminal charges against 19 immigrants for illegally voting in North Carolina.
In 2022, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, conducted an audit of his state’s voter rolls, specifically looking for noncitizens. His office found that 1,634 people had tried to register, but election officials had intercepted all the registrations and none were actually registered to vote.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal group, surveyed 44 election officials in some of the country’s most populous, immigrant-heavy jurisdictions after 2016, including Arizona, California and Texas. Only about 30 incidents were found where a possible non-citizen voted out of the 23.5 million votes cast in those places.
One researcher used internet poll data to extrapolate the number of votes cast by non-residents and concluded that more votes must have been cast than the reviews indicate. Trump cited his work in 2016, but even that researcher, Professor Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University, has said that Trump misused his work and that there is no evidence that non-citizen votes were high enough to win statehood against the former president.
The Voting Rights Lab, a left-wing group that monitors voting laws, says that since the 2020 election and Trump’s lies about losses due to fraud, nine states have implemented new laws to further block non-citizen voting and that sixteen states are currently considering additional provisions.
That includes Texas, where the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a sweeping voting law in 2021 that revived the provision that had previously led to tens of thousands of U.S. citizens being wrongly classified as illegal voters. Civil rights groups have filed another lawsuit to block it. The Republican National Committee, which Trump recently brought under his control, is asking the court to uphold the provision.