The Noncitizen Voting Myth
The Fear that millions of newly arrived illegal immigrants are swaying federal elections by voting unlawfully has become a recurring theme in debates over immigration.
The idea has so much buy-in that earlier this year, House lawmakers passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which calls for states to “take affirmative steps on an ongoing basis to ensure that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote” in federal elections. Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.), who co-sponsored the Senate version of the SAVE Act, implied that it was a timely—and urgent—attempt to ensure election integrity.
“As millions of illegal immigrants enter our country because of President [Joe] Biden’s failed border policies,” Tillis said, “it is crucial we safeguard our democratic process by ensuring only American citizens can register and vote in our elections.”
The Supreme Court even weighed in on the subject in August. In a 5–4 decision, it allowed Arizona to require proof of citizenship for people registering to vote using a state form (but rejected a request to impose the same restriction on people using a federal form).
It’s been illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections for a century. But beyond that, there’s little evidence to suggest that many noncitizens are voting in federal elections, let alone in large enough numbers to sway those races.
In 2017, the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive nonprofit, interviewed election officials “who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 general election,” including in many jurisdictions with high populations of noncitizens. The officials “referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution,” amounting to “0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions,” according to the Brennan Center.
The conservative Heritage Foundation, which frequently warns about the danger of noncitizens voting, comes to a similar conclusion. Its database of “election fraud cases” includes around 70 instances of noncitizens voting illegally since 2000, representing under 5 percent of the database. Many of those cases involved lawful permanent residents who were “encouraged by a government official to vote or falsely told that they were eligible,” wrote American Immigration Council Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
The trend holds even in states that have recently become election integrity battlegrounds. A 2023 study analyzed by The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler recorded “fewer than 1,000 noncitizen votes
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