Numerous safeguards ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in our elections. These include harsh criminal penalties such as prison and fines for noncitizens who try to register or vote — not to mention deportation. Despite that, some politicians have peddled the lie that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers — and they’re using those claims in order to enact restrictive voting policies. These conspiracy theories are not harmless rhetoric. They are causing real damage to real people and to our democracy.
Election officials have purged or threatened to purge eligible voters.
For example, several states have inaccurately flagged legitimate voters as noncitizens and stricken them from their electoral rolls in recent years. State officials have sent out cancellation notices and, in some cases, attempted to purge tens of thousands of eligible registered voters based on unreliable information about citizenship status.
In one of the most sweeping measures, Texas sent threatening notices to some 95,000 people in 2019, more than half of whom had voted in at least one state election over the previous 18 years. More recently, Tennessee sent letters in June 2024 to more than 14,000 registered voters asking them for proof of citizenship. In 2024, Ohio Secretary of State LaRose began cutting hundreds of voters from the rolls using DMV information, jury data, and SAVE records. Virginia struck more than 6,000 voters from its rolls between 2022 and 2024. And in August 2024, Alabama purged more than 3,000 voters from its rolls, many of whom Secretary of State Wes Allen admitted might have been naturalized citizens. Texas claims to have removed 6,500 noncitizens from its voter rolls over the past three years. Time and again, these purges have resulted in the removal — or attempted removal — of U.S. citizens.
While many citizens affected by these moves have managed to reregister, quantifying how many have been prevented from voting or may be barred from upcoming elections is impossible. What is known is that letters such as those sent in Tennessee and Texas have an intimidating effect. One recipient, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School in Tennessee, expressed discomfort at the thought of submitting proof of citizenship documentation through the mail. Only after the ACLU of Tennessee threatened legal action, calling the letters’ demands unconstitutional and violations of federal law, did the state elections coordinator send follow-up letters informing voters that it was not necessary for citizens to submit such documentation.
Some states have imposed unworkable documentation requirements that disenfranchise citizens.
In Arizona in 2004, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — a Southern Poverty Law Center–designated hate group) — and a group called Protect Arizona Now orchestrated Proposition 200. Voters passed the proposition, which among other things required voters to present proof of citizenship (e.g. a birth certificate or passport) at the polls. Arizona is the only state with a two-track system for voting, in which state and local elections require documentary proof of citizenship. A court struck down this requirement for federal elections.
The law’s impact was staggering. During the first year after it took effect, it prevented more than 10,000 people from registering to vote in Maricopa County alone. At the time, one Maricopa County official said that most of those blocked “probably are U.S. citizens whose married names differ from their birth certificates or who have lost documentation.” An astonishing one in three applicants in the state’s three most populous counties were rejected in only the first five months.
Obtaining necessary documentation can be time-consuming, expensive, and prohibitively difficult. It can take weeks to months in some states to receive a replacement birth certificate. Passport fees start at $65 and a replacement naturalization certificate costs more than $500. For people who were never issued a birth certificate, the process can be highly problematic; they must prove their citizenship using documents such as a baptism certificate, early school records, or census records, which are frequently hard to track down.
Arizona voters challenged the law in federal court, which determined that Prop 200 had blocked at least 31,500 applicants from registering statewide. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the National Voter Registration Act preempted the new law’s application to registration for federal elections. So Arizona has for years been operating a confusing system of dual registration where registrants who do not show documentary proof of citizenship are only permitted to vote in federal elections, not state and local contests.
In 2013, Kansas enacted a similar documentary proof-of-citizenship law at the behest of former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Although Kobach was only able to demonstrate 39 cases of noncitizen registration going back to 1999, a federal trial court found that the law temporarily barred 31,089 U.S. citizens from registering to vote. Many of these citizens were ultimately unable to vote at all despite the fact that nearly all of them were eligible. Eventually, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a trial court’s ruling striking down the law, stating that Kobach had “failed to show that a substantial number of noncitizens successfully registered to vote.” (Even so, Trump appointed Kobach to head a commission tasked with ferreting out voter fraud — which lasted less than a year and failed to produce any evidence of a material problem.)
This year, both Louisiana and New Hampshire enacted laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship (neither law will be in effect for the 2024 election). In addition, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has pushed a federal bill, the SAVE Act, which would impose the same requirement nationwide. In the news conference announcing the bill, Johnson acknowledged that he did not have real evidence to support the need for it, arguing instead that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.”
The damage caused by a federal bill would be devastating. A survey conducted by the Brennan Center, VoteRiders, Public Wise, and the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement found that approximately 21.3 million eligible voters do not have or could not quickly access their U.S. birth certificate, passport, naturalization certificate, or certificate of citizenship. For around 3.8 million adult citizens, no such documentation of citizenship even exists. These requirements also tend to disenfranchise some groups more than others. While just over 8 percent of self-identified white American citizens don’t have citizenship documents readily available, that number is nearly 11 percent among Americans of color.
Election deniers are abusing the legal system and law enforcement powers to push these conspiracy theories at the expense of immigrants and our democracy.
In August 2024 alone, election deniers have sued administrators in Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, baselessly accusing them of failing to prevent noncitizen voting. In fact, at least 10 lawsuits filed nationwide make allegations rooted in this conspiracy theory. These lawsuits are likely headed nowhere, just like suits that made similar claims in 2020, including one that famously resulted in Rudy Giuliani’s disbarment. But in the meantime, they provide a veneer of legitimacy for conspiracies, and risk undermining public faith in our elections. And they might be used to justify attempts to subvert the outcome of the election. That was one of the tactics Trump and his allies used in 2020 when, for example, they filed a baseless suit in New Mexico as a pretext to justify a fake elector slate in that state (a suit they later dropped).
In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into baseless rumors spread by a Fox News host about efforts to register noncitizens in that state. Local officials promptly debunked the rumors. He also ordered raids of the homes of multiple members of the League of United Latin American Citizens as part of investigations of alleged “vote harvesting,” though it is not clear whether those allegations are related to conspiracy theories about noncitizens voting, which Paxton has subscribed to in public statements. In September, a federal court ruling stopped such investigations, finding the portion of a state law used to justify them unconstitutional.
Paxton has also launched investigations into at least five immigration-focused nonprofits just this year. The raids on LULAC members have already prompted them to stop volunteering for the organization, which conducts voter registration drives, among other things. And all this law enforcement activity is likely to have a similar intimidating effect on others, especially immigrants and their neighbors and allies.
But the impact is even broader than that. The disinformation campaign amplified by these lawsuits and investigations breeds suspicion and animus towards immigrants and inspires lay citizens to activism that can also intimidate. Election denier and former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell has helped organize a group of activists that call themselves the “Only Citizens Vote Coalition.” The coalition’s plans include efforts to post threatening signs about the consequences for voting while ineligible and they have discussed targeting Spanish-speaking communities.
Here’s the truth.
Noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare.
Despite these disingenuous efforts to rout out the alleged scourge of noncitizen voting, the reality is that noncitizens have no reason to vote illegally — risking their homes, livelihoods, and freedom in the process. Moreover, there is no evidence that they have ever done so in any significant numbers. Large-scale purges like the ones undertaken in Arizona, Kansas, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia end up doing more harm than good by disenfranchising eligible voters.
In 2022, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger conducted a substantial audit on the issue, finding that not a single noncitizen had cast a ballot in the state going back 25 years. In that period, just under 1,700 voter registrants were flagged as suspected noncitizens — amounting to roughly 68 registration attempts per year in a state with over seven million active registered voters — and all of them were prevented from voting. Raffensperger even went on to state definitively in March 2024, “Noncitizens are not voting in Georgia.”
Similarly, a 2017 Brennan Center study showed that “across 42 jurisdictions, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 general election referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution.” In other words, suspected improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the votes in those jurisdictions.
Numerous penalties are already in place to deter illegal noncitizen voting.
It is a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and a crime in every state for noncitizens to vote in state elections. In fact, under federal law, noncitizens can face up to five years in prison simply for registering to vote. A handful of local governments in a few states have allowed noncitizens to vote in local-only elections (e.g., school boards), but these localities are prohibited by law from allowing noncitizens to register or vote in state or federal elections. It defies common sense that people would risk prison to cast a single vote unlikely to affect the outcome of a minor election.
In addition to being a felony, it is a deportable offense. Immigrants have often fled violence, persecution, or extreme poverty in their home countries. The process to obtain legal immigrant status is complex and expensive and can take years. For these individuals, the risk of deportation can be scarier than the risk of imprisonment.
This calculus is even starker for someone here without legal status. These individuals generally live in fear of being discovered by the authorities and imprisoned or deported. To vote, an undocumented individual would have to willingly identify themselves to government officials and attest (falsely) to their citizenship, usually under penalty of perjury. Doing so would put their freedom and their life in the United States in jeopardy. Again, that a person would do so just to cast a single vote is doubtful.
Current laws also make detection of any rare instances of noncitizen voting probable, as the Georgia audit illustrates. Federal law (52 U.S. Code §§ 20507, 21083) requires local election officials to keep voter lists up to date and remove ineligible voters. States regularly check these lists against other state databases to flag potentially ineligible voters, including noncitizens.
So what’s behind the false claim that noncitizens are voting in our elections? Election deniers want to sow distrust in elections so if they lose, they can play on that distrust when they try to overturn the result.
