As Republicans across the country sound alarms over the potential for illegal, noncitizen voting in the upcoming presidential election — and roll out measures to prevent it — they've painted a picture suggesting the matter is a widespread fraud that threatens the legitimacy of the results. But experts say the opposite is true, and instead, these efforts to curtail what is effectively a non-issue amount to little more than voter suppression tactics.
Hinging their claims on the influx of migrants in recent years along the United States-Mexico border, GOP officials and activists have increasingly mounted concerns about the potential for noncitizen voting as November approaches. Officials have gone on to review and purge voter rolls, place constitutional amendments on their state ballots and issue executive orders as part of efforts to thwart such voter fraud.
In Louisiana, a state that explicitly bans noncitizen voting in its constitution, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry recently signed an executive order requiring state agencies that offer voter registration forms to include a disclaimer that only U.S. citizens can vote.
"Voting is a privilege reserved for American citizens, and it’s crucial that we uphold this standard," he wrote in a Sunday post to X highlighting the order.
ICYMI: Earlier this week, I signed an executive order requiring all Louisiana agencies to clearly inform individuals that ONLY U.S. citizens are eligible to register to #vote. Voting is a privilege reserved for American citizens, and it’s crucial that we uphold this standard.… pic.twitter.com/TeCjGjClLt
— Governor Jeff Landry (@LAGovJeffLandry) September 1, 2024
But that standard is already being upheld by the law enforcement structures in place federally to deter non-U.S. citizens from participating in this kind of voter fraud, argued Jonathan Diaz, the director of Voting Advocacy and Partnerships for the Campaign Legal Center.
"Would you risk prison time and potentially being deported to cast one ballot for president? That doesn't seem like a great trade off to me," he told Salon. "The penalties are very steep, and people who are going through the immigration system, who are here in this country and are not U.S. citizens, tend to be pretty careful about following the law because they don't want to get deported and they don't want to be charged with a crime. They're not savvy political operatives.
"All of these big, flashy efforts that these state AGs, the speaker of the House, and all of these people are doing is really just political theater," Diaz added.
U.S. law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, with penalties for violators ranging from fines to up to a year of imprisonment and even deportation. Registering to vote similarly requires people to confirm under penalty of perjury that they are U.S. citizens.
Federal law also requires states to regularly review and update their voter rolls and remove anyone who is ineligible. According to the Associated Press, no state constitutions explicitly authorize noncitizens to vote, and many states also have laws barring them from voting for state offices (though a handful of municipalities nationwide allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections).
In reality, that form of voter fraud is exceedingly rare. State audits and reports from groups spanning the political spectrum have repeatedly found that a minute number of noncitizens register to vote and an even smaller crop manage to cast ballots.
A Brennan Center analysis of 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 election found only 30 incidents of suspected — not proven — noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes tabulated, amounting to just 0.0001% of the vote.
Analyses from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation's database have also found scant evidence of noncitizen voter registration and voting, much less widespread fraud. The former saw that the number of noncitizen votes uncovered through state audits in 2016 ranged from just three out of more than a million votes in Nevada to 41 in North Carolina, which saw nearly five million votes cast. The latter analysis, a review of Heritage Foundation data by immigrant rights group the American Immigration Council, found just 68 documented cases of noncitizens voting in the think tank's database dating as far back as the 1980s. That number represents less than 5 percent of the cases in the Heritage Foundation database, and out of millions of ballots cast over the time frame, such quantities are miniscule.
"It's infinitesimal the number of actual noncitizens who register or vote, and most of that is inadvertent. It's not like they're nefarious," said Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University whose research focuses on noncitizen voting laws.
If noncitizens do end up on voter registration rolls, it's usually due to clerical and administrative errors, and the number is not significant enough to influence the outcome of the election, Diaz explained.
"Even when there are these handful of cases, it's not for the reasons that are being elevated," Hayduk added, "that Democrats are letting immigrants into the country, they're actively registering them to win elections, and doing so in ways that dilute the votes of citizens and are a strategy to defeat the Republicans, illegitimately."
During a news conference earlier this year about the Safeguard Voter Eligibility Act, a bill GOP members of Congress are rallying behind that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., insisted noncitizen voting was a concern but did not offer any specific examples to support the claim.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections," Johnson said, "but it’s not been something that is easily provable.”
Diaz said, however, that concerned election officials' failure to prosecute and secure convictions in the cases that would theoretically arise from rampant noncitizen voting shows both that the safeguards against it are working and that the issue is far overblown.
If there were "these huge numbers of non-U.S. citizens on the voter registration roll," he argued, "the same attorney generals and secretaries of state pushing this narrative" every election cycle "would be prosecuting them and securing convictions, and that just doesn't happen."
Still, election officials in red states have taken a number of measures to lessen the potential for that voter fraud to take place.
Just last week, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that more than 6,500 potential noncitizens had been pulled from the state's voter rolls since 2021, including nearly 2,000 with "a voter history" who have been referred for investigation by the attorney general's office. In August, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, also said he'd referred 138 apparent noncitizens found to have recently voted and 459 more who registered but did not vote. Those numbers amount to small fractions of the 18 million registered voters in Texas and the more than 8 million in Ohio.
Officials in Alabama and Georgia made similar announcements, with Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, a Republican, saying recently that 3,251 people previously listed as noncitizens by the federal government were switched to inactive status on the state's voter registration rolls, which includes more than 3 million registered voters, according to the AP.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger reported he found that 1,634 potential noncitizens attempted to register to vote between 1997 and 2022 though failed when election officials flagged them. In that time, Georgia had registered millions of other eligible voters.
In the aftermath of previous election cycles, Diaz explained, it was not uncommon for officials who claimed they identified large numbers of suspected noncitizen registered voters to amend their statements to note that the alleged offenders were mostly people who hadn't been citizens at one point but were later naturalized and lawfully registered.
"They're relying on stale, out-of-date databases and resources and making a big deal out of this to score political points and to seed this narrative that our elections are fundamentally broken and plagued by noncitizen voting, so that if their side loses, they can point to that as the reason why," Diaz argued. "Should their favored candidates win, I think they'll all of a sudden get very quiet about this supposed problem of non citizen voting. It's only a problem when they lose."
Following the footsteps of North Dakota, Colorado, Alabama, Ohio and Florida, where voters passed amendments between 2018 and 2022 limiting voting to "only" citizens, Republican-led legislatures in eight states — Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Idaho, Kentucky and Wisconsin — have introduced constitutional amendments on their November ballots aiming to explicitly declare the same.
In Texas, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton established Wednesday a dedicated email account for reports of suspected violations of election laws, citing "significant growth of the noncitizen population," and Raffensperger last week authorized a requirement that polling places post signs in English and Spanish alerting noncitizens that it is illegal for them to vote.
Republicans in Wisconsin have in recent weeks filed a set of lawsuits challenging the state's citizen verification process for registered voters, while some in North Carolina have sued the state's election board, accusing it of failing to enforce a new law aimed at removing people who seek exclusions from jury duty because they are not citizens from voter rolls.
Along with the move to require proof of citizenship to vote — which many Americans don't have readily available — these efforts to curb voter fraud serve in "justifying the imposition, as it did historically, of restrictive voter registration procedures," Hayduk said. More often than not, these actions instead "disenfranchise eligible citizens who tend to be lower income, people with lower levels of education, often urban voters who tend to register and vote for Democrats."
The "drumbeat" of allegations of noncitizen voting also, he explained, fuels suspicion that can motivate people to go to poll sites and "intimidate" or harass others during the voting process, or place signs in neighborhoods with large immigrant, Latino or Asian American populations stating the illegality of noncitizen voting.
That behavior can have "a huge chilling effect, particularly on naturalized citizens, who are often the ones targeted by these efforts," Diaz added.
Republican officials pushing these claims also runs the risk of disrupting and straining the election administrations process should it motivate their supporters to submit lists with thousands of potentially ineligible people to their local elections offices and demand they be removed, he added, noting that many states have a formal process that allows voters to challenge others' eligibility and requires administrators to evaluate and verify or adjudicate those challenges.
Hayduk argued that the Republican mobilization behind the claims also "lays the groundwork" for them to place unsubstantiated blame on noncitizens, "contest elections, draw out the elections, create chaos and maybe motivate people to go do another Jan. 6 attack."
"The great replacement fears, immigration restrictions, the rationale to have voter ID, proof of citizenship, all of this — these are basically voter suppression tactics which have been in process or enacted in many states around the country, and they want to do that on a national level," Hayduk said.
"I think it feeds into this whole notion of who are the rightful holders of this cherished power, the right to vote?" he added. "Who are real Americans? What's the nature of America? It links to these broad debates that are happening in the country."
