Noncitizen Voting is Vanishingly Rare

For years, the Brennan Center has collected research showing that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare. Below is a review of developments and the literature on one subset of voter fraud claims — the allegation that ineligible noncitizens are voting in large numbers.

In 2024, a few elected state officials claim to have found people suspected of being noncitizens registered to vote. Some of them have already admitted that these searches likely include naturalized citizens. We do not have enough information yet to fully evaluate these claims. But, as set forth below, every time a state has conducted such investigations in the past, the result has been the same: actual incidents of noncitizens voting is not a significant occurrence.

Comprehensive Studies Have Found that Noncitizen Voting Is Vanishingly Rare

• Rutgers University political scientist Lorraine C. Minnite has studied voter fraud allegations for more than a decade. She has concluded that voter fraud, including noncitizen voting, is “extremely rare.” In one analysis of the first three years of a Justice Department initiative to uncover voter fraud ending in 2005, she found that there were only 14 convictions of noncitizens for voting.
• In another study, Minnite examined all complaints of voter misconduct received by the California and Oregon secretaries of state for more than a decade. California received a total of 28 complaints of noncitizen voting, and Oregon, five. Out of that total, there were only four convictions.
• In 2007, the Brennan Center conducted a nationwide survey of a decade of news accounts and other complaints of noncitizen voting. The results showed that allegations of noncitizen voting that prove unfounded are far more common than allegations that turn out to be true. Some of the exaggerated or baseless allegations highlighted in that study include: A 2005 investigation into 1,668 Washington residents with “foreign-sounding names” which turned up no noncitizens; a 2000 investigation into 553 Hawaiians alleged to be improperly registered noncitizens, but none of whom had voted, and 2001 investigation in Milwaukee of 370,000 voting records that found four potential instances of naturalized persons voting before their naturalization date. Even if one accepts all of the allegations of noncitizen voting as true, noncitizens voters would have accounted for between .0002 percent and .017 percent of the votes in the relevant jurisdiction.
• In 2015, three researches thoroughly debunked the conclusions of a 2014 study by Jesse Richman claiming that 6.4 and 2.2 percent of noncitizens voted in the 2008 and 2010 elections, respectively. 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.” In 2020, the conservative Cato Institute also rebuked the 2014 study. And in 2023, even Richman himself submitted an expert report for a case, analyzing the Arizona voter file and DMV files, and finding that only 1,934 voters had records that indicated they were not citizens at the time they registered or after registering to vote. Assuming the finding is true, the number amounts to .04 percent of the entire Arizona voter file of 4 million, a small fraction of the number of noncitizens he claimed had voted in his original study.
• In 2016, the Brennan Center conducted a national survey of 44 election administrators representing 42 jurisdictions in 12 states, including officials in eight of the 10 jurisdictions with the largest populations of noncitizens nationally. Across these jurisdictions, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 election referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. That is .0001 percent of votes case during that election.

State Investigations Have Uncovered Almost No Instances of Noncitizen Voting

• A 2010 survey of Minnesota county attorneys found that, in the 18 months following the 2008 election, only nine incidents of possible noncitizen voting had been investigated out of 2.9 million ballots cast. None of these nine incidents resulted in a conviction.
• New Mexico’s secretary of state reviewed that state’s list of 1.2 million voters in 2011. The secretary of state’s office only referred nine individuals to the state attorney general for investigation about their citizenship status.
• In 2012, the Florida secretary of state reviewed a list of 180,000 potential noncitizens that the office set out to purge at the request of the governor. After all the errors on that list were uncovered, only 85 names were removed from the rolls as alleged noncitizens, and only one person was convicted of fraud.
• In 2012, after Michigan’s secretary of state claimed that as many as 4,000 noncitizens were registered to vote, a review of the list resulted in only 10 people being referred to the state attorney general for further investigation because they had voted.
• Also in 2012, Colorado’s secretary of state identified just 35 individuals on the rolls who were allegedly noncitizens and had voted. The investigation followed the secretary’s original claim that 11,805 noncitizens were registered to vote.
• In a 2013 letter to the North Carolina General Assembly, the executive director of the Board of Elections detailed every case of potential voter fraud in the state from 2002 to 2012. In those years, the Board of Elections referred 58 cases of potential noncitizen voting to prosecutors for further investigation. Considering that 19.5 million votes were cast in that time and assuming every allegation were true, noncitizen votes would have amounted to .0003 percent of the total.
• In a check of the registration rolls in 2013 and 2015, Ohio’s secretary of state concluded that 44 noncitizens voted in at least one election dating back to 2000. By way of reference, there were 3.26 million ballots cast in Ohio in 2015 alone. “None of these affected the outcome of an election,” Ohio Secretary of State John Husted told the Columbus Dispatch.
• Iowa spent $250,000 from 2012 to 2014 looking into potential noncitizen voters. It started with 3,000 individuals registered to vote who had at some point identified as noncitizens. That led to investigations of 147 individuals who had cast ballots, many of whom were discovered to be citizens. After two years of investigation, county attorneys brought charges against just 10 alleged noncitizens.
• The Nevada secretary of state conducted a statewide audit of voter rolls in 2016 and identified a mere three noncitizens who had registered and voted in the 2016 election. Considering that more than 1.1 million ballots were cast in Nevada for that election, noncitizen votes amounted to .0003 percent of the total.
• Also in 2016, North Carolina State Board of Elections announced that 41 noncitizens cast ballots in the 2016 election. The U.S. Department of Justice charged 19 foreign nationals with voting illegally in 2016 nationwide, which would have amounted to .0003 of the total ballots cast in North Carolina that election.
• In 2017, the Ohio secretary of state announced that 126 noncitizens had cast a ballot since 2013, including 82 found in 2017 who the secretary referred to law enforcement for further investigation. Assuming the truth of allegations, even if all those votes occurred in the same year, noncitizen votes would have amounted to .0015 percent of the roughly 8 million people who vote in Ohio each election.
• In 2019, Texas flagged almost 100,000 voters on its voter rolls as possible noncitizens. A federal court blocked then–acting Texas Secretary of State David Whitley from purging these voters, many of whom were actually naturalized citizens. The court called Whitley’s efforts “a solution looking for a problem.”
• In 2020, after an investigation into alleged noncitizen voting, the Ohio secretary of state referred 104 cases of alleged noncitizen voter registration and 13 cases of alleged noncitizen voting for prosecution. Assuming the truth of the latter figure, noncitizen ballots cast would have amounted to .00016 percent of the ballots cast during the primary and general that year. In contextualizing the finding, Ohio’s own secretary of state admitted that “voter fraud is exceedingly rare.”
• In 2022, the Georgia secretary of state’s office conducted a citizenship review of the state’s voter rolls and found that it could not verify the citizenship of 1,634 voter registration applicants but that the state’s registration procedures screened the applicants, and none had actually voted.

Nationwide Surveys by Journalists Found that Noncitizen Voting Is Practically Nonexistent

• After the 2016 election, the New York Times surveyed election and law enforcement officials in 49 states and the District of Columbia. It learned of two possible instances of noncitizens voting out of 137.7 million voters nationwide.
• The Washington Post also did a survey after the 2016 election. It compiled reports from the Nexis database. In all, the Post found four demonstrated cases of any type of voter fraud, and no instances of noncitizens voting.
• News21, an investigative reporting project based at Arizona State University, reviewed all reported instances of voter fraud from 2000 to 2012. It found 56 cases of alleged noncitizen voting. Even assuming all of these allegations are true and that all of these purported noncitizens voted in 2016, it would total approximately .00004 percent of all ballots cast.   

Past Claims of Noncitizen Voting by Public Entities and Personalities Have Been Disproved

• In 2016 and 2017, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal organization, published two reports purporting to show that thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote in Virginia. The reports included the home addresses and phone numbers of many innocent people, including U.S. citizens. Four of those citizens sued PILF for defamation and voter intimidation. The case settled in 2019, and the leader of PILF was required to issue a written apology.
• In 2018, Fox television host Lou Dobbs claimed that many illegal immigrants voted in the November 2018 midterm election. But no one who looked into the allegation could find any evidence to support the claim.
• In November and December 2020, Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy 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.” 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 . . . .”

• In 2024, Fox television host Maria Bartiromo claimed that immigrants in Texas city were registering to vote outside a state drivers license facility. The local elections official and local Republican Party chair confirmed there was no evidence to support the claim.

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It is not surprising that noncitizen voting is rare. In addition to prison and massive fines, a noncitizen would risk deportation or derailing their naturalization process by voting. Moreover, many undocumented individuals are reluctant to interact with government officials.