The Myth of Widespread Noncitizen Voting

 Many posts have discussed immigration. Illegal voting by noncitizens is rare.

Jack Izzo at Snopes:

Noncitizens rarely vote in U.S. elections. This is not a partisan opinion. The Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, concluded this in 2020 and reiterated the same conclusion in 2026

Supposed data that concludes the opposite is often wrong. That survey Trump cited in 2016 to claim that 14% of noncitizens were registered to vote? A 2015 statistical analysis of that study found the result was simply due to human error — out of a nationally representative sample, all the "noncitizens" who marked themselves as registered to vote were almost certainly U.S. citizens who accidentally recorded themselves as noncitizens when taking the survey.

In 2016 and 2017, the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal nonprofit organization, investigated 42 jurisdictions across 12 states to find out whether there was any truth to claims of voter fraud. Of the 10 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population of noncitizens, the survey looked at eight of them.

According to the center's report, voters cast 23.5 million votes in these jurisdictions in the election. The institute counted 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting that required further investigation. That's an occurrence rate of 0.0001% — similar to the odds of being struck by lightning in your life.

Under federal law, states are required to maintain and audit voter rolls regularly to ensure an election's integrity. As an example, Georgia was a focal point of the 2020 election. Trump claimed fraud and asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes," essentially asking him to flip the state's results. Raffensperger ordered an audit of Georgia's voter rolls in 2022 announcing that the state found 1,634 cases in which a noncitizen attempted to register to vote between 1997 to 2022, about 65 per year. But according to that report, none of the individuals in those cases ever officially voted, thanks to the existing protections that safeguard the voter registration process.