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Voting and Citizenship

Federal law dictates that only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections.

States have multiple checks in place to ensure that only eligible citizens can vote. To even register to vote in state and federal elections, you must swear you’re a citizen under penalty of criminal prosecution. Noncitizens are not permitted to vote in state and federal elections. So it should come as no surprise that every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare.

Despite this, certain politicians frequently claim that it is happening on a significant scale, attempting to turn immigrants into a scapegoat as a way to drum up support and undermine trust in the election system. Then if they lose, they can call for the election to be overturned.

This page compiles studies that rebut the myth of noncitizen voting, and it shows the harm to democracy caused when politicians spread this falsehood and use it to justify restrictive voting policies and election subversion.