States have multiple checks in place to ensure that only eligible citizens can vote. But in recent years, politicians and others have attempted to gin up fear that this is not the case.
Election deniers are laying the groundwork to contest the results if their preferred candidates don’t win. And their false claims have been used as a pretext to purge substantial numbers of voters from the rolls and enact restrictive voting laws that risk disenfranchising voters of color, low-income voters, and others.
This resource identifies the mouthpieces for these conspiracy theories and debunks the inaccurate claims.
Who: State officials in Alabama, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia
What: Officials in each of these states have recently claimed to have purged thousands of potential noncitizens from their electoral rolls, stoking fears about noncitizen voting. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose directed county election boards to strike 136 noncitizen registrations from the state’s voter rolls in May 2024 and another 499 in August. In June, Tennessee election officials sent letters to more than 14,000 registered voters identified through DMV records threatening criminal prosecution for voting as noncitizens. In August, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin claimed to have cut 6,300 voters between 2022 and 2024, and Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen directed all county election boards to purge 3,000-plus voters who had been issued noncitizen identification at some point in the past. That same month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced the removal of 6,500 noncitizens from the voter rolls over the past three years.
Result: Advocates have been quick to point out that these announcements are short on details and misleading. And while officials have not disclosed the specific procedures they use to identify potential noncitizen voters, similar efforts in the past were rife with error.
That seems to be the case this time around as well. In Tennessee, thousands of the voters sent letters have already provided proof that they are citizens, and the state abandoned plans to purge the recipients. There is already reporting about eligible citizens targeted by the purges and notices in Alabama and Ohio. None of this comes as a surprise. In his press release announcing the Alabama purge, Secretary of State Allen admitted that flagged individuals may have become naturalized after their IDs were issued. Virginia officials have acknowledged in the past that the systems they use can accidentally flag citizens as potential noncitizens, and that they send out cancellation notices without confirming citizenship status.
In 2019, a federal court blocked then–acting Texas Secretary of State David Whitley from purging almost 100,000 voters, tens of thousands of whom were actually naturalized citizens. The court called Whitley’s efforts “a solution looking for a problem . . . [that] exemplifies the power of government to strike fear and anxiety and to intimidate the least powerful among us.” According to the settlement reached in the case, Texas is only supposed to flag voters who have previously registered to vote and recently provided documentation to indicate noncitizenship. There is no indication, however, that Texas officials followed this process prior to Abbott’s recent voter purge. Whitely ultimately resigned in disgrace moments after the Texas legislature failed to confirm him as secretary of state.
Who: Rudolph Giuliani, former New York City mayor turned attorney for Donald Trump
What: In November and December 2020, Giuliani falsely claimed that noncitizens in Arizona voted in large numbers in the 2020 election, stating that “the bare minimum is 40 or 50,000, the reality is probably about 250,000.”
Result: Giuliani was disbarred in New York for breaking state rules of professional conduct governing attorneys — specifically, for knowingly making false or dishonest statements and “engag[ing] in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation . . . .” At his disciplinary hearing, the court-appointed referee found Giuliani’s “claims of illegal voters participating in the election in Arizona . . . on their face, false and dishonest” and confirmed that there was no evidence to support his assertions. Giuliani also faces nine felony charges in the Arizona fake elector case, which arose out of a nationwide effort by Trump and his allies to undermine the 2020 presidential election results.
Who: James Agresti (owner of the website JustFacts.com), the Heartland Institute, True the Vote, Elon Musk (owner of X), Former President Trump, and various influencers
What: Agresti falsely professed that between 10 and 27 percent of noncitizens in the United States are illegally registered to vote. Others touted Agresti’s claim as a “new study.”
Result: In a November 2020 blog post, Agresti restated widely discredited 2014 research by Jesse Richman, a professor at Old Dominion University. The year after Richman’s study was published, an article in the same journal thoroughly debunked his conclusions. One of the authors of the study condemning Richman’s work said of the refuted study: “As a member of the team that produces the datasets upon which that study was based . . . I can say unequivocally that this research is not only wrong, it is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place.”
The conservative Cato Institute described Agresti’s analysis as an example of “survey misuse, misdesign, and misinterpretation.” According to Snopes.com, even Richman no longer stands by the original study’s estimates of noncitizen voter participation (which did not stop then–presidential candidate Trump from citing the Richman study in October 2016 as evidence that noncitizens were voting in large numbers). In 2017, more than 200 political scientists and statisticians signed an open letter stating that “the scholarly political science community has generally rejected the findings in the Richman study.”
Who: The Heritage Foundation
What: The right-leaning foundation’s database of voting fraud cases purports to “demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed.” This year, Heritage published videos of seven alleged noncitizens in Georgia admitting to registering and claimed it was evidence that more than 47,000 noncitizens were registered to vote.
Result: The actual figures in the database tell the opposite story, reflecting that it found only 24 votes cast by noncitizens over a period of nearly 50 years. Setting aside the absurd math used to extrapolate a claim that tens of thousands of people violated state and federal criminal law from seven individual interactions, the Heritage videos were surreptitiously recorded under false pretenses, and a subsequent investigation by the Georgia Secretary of State revealed that there was no evidence that any of the people shown had registered to vote. At least one of the women recorded said she used a fake name and lied to the people that came to her door claiming they were trying to get her registered to vote in order to try to get them to leave. These desperate attempts to manufacture evidence echo tactics previously used by organizations like Project Veritas and the Public Interest Legal Foundation, both of which have suffered legal consequences as a result of employing them.
