Noncitizen voting lies, explained

Viral lies are straight out of the election subversion playbook

Believe it or not, for America's first 150 years almost all states allowed noncitizen voting. But things are completely different today: Noncitizens are prohibited from voting by multiple federal laws and illegal voting is a crime in every state.

But as you’ve likely read, the lie that noncitizen voting is a major threat to U.S. elections is suddenly everywhere. Make no mistake: This is an intentional tactic by the authoritarian movement, its latest attempt to confuse and intimidate voters and lay the groundwork for subverting the results of the election. 

The facts about noncitizen voting

First, voting by noncitizens is exceedingly rare. A nationwide survey of local election officials by the Brennan Center for Justice found only 30 incidents of suspected noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million ballots cast across 42 jurisdictions — a rate of 0.0001 percent. Actual investigations have uncovered almost no instances of noncitizen voting. 

As Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recently stated: 

So, my fellow Georgians asked me, ‘are noncitizens voting in Georgia?’ I can say, ‘No, they aren’t,’ because we’ve checked it.

Even so-called “election integrity” groups — including former President Trump’s own “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” and the Heritage Foundation — have searched and searched but found no evidence of systematic or widespread noncitizen voting. 

Second, multiple laws prohibit noncitizens from voting in federal elections, including the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996. Violators can not only be fined and imprisoned for up to a year, but noncitizens can also be deported or be denied citizenship or immigration benefits. And election officials — as required by federal law and a variety of state laws — take a range of steps to verify the identity and citizenship status of all voters. 

To say it plainly, an ineligible individual wouldn’t gain anything personally from illegally casting a ballot — and would have a whole lot to lose. 

Yet despite these laws and data, the authoritarian movement continues to spread and act on lies about noncitizen voting. For example, a rapidly debunked conspiracy theory prompted Texas’s Attorney General’s recent investigation into alleged efforts to register noncitizens to vote (local Republican officials have already stated these “strange” claims are baseless). 

Last week, Trump-aligned legal organizations filed suit in Arizona to force county election officials to complete detailed citizenship investigations in potential violation of federal voting rights legislation. 

Just this weekend, The New York Times covered the Heritage Foundation’s efforts to spread deceptive videos falsely suggesting that noncitizens were registered to vote in Georgia — a video that Georgia’s secretary of state called “a stunt.” 

And armed with this false narrative, some legislators are now even threatening a government shutdown over legislation aimed at addressing the non-existent problem of noncitizen voting.

Why spread these lies? 

This campaign of lies is drawn straight from the toolkit of ploys autocrats use to influence and ultimately corrupt elections. These lies have consequences for American democracy broadly, but especially for the most marginalized groups in our country.

For one, bad-faith purges risk removing eligible voters from the rolls, with voters of color and recently naturalized citizens at greatest risk. This happened in 2019, when the secretary of state of Texas directed county registrars to purge approximately 95,000 individuals from the voter rolls. It became apparent almost immediately that at least 25,000 names on that list were lawfully registered citizen voters. 

Given the immediately obvious defects in Texas’s list, a federal judge swiftly halted that flawed and discriminatory effort, and Texas shortly after entered into a settlement agreement that rescinded the original advisory and mandated new procedures for voter list maintenance. As the judge put it, this was “ham-handed” and “a solution looking for a problem.”

But undeterred by past failures, Texas and other states have continued using similar purges. And once again, we’re already seeing natural-born or naturalized citizens being erroneously flagged for removal from the voter rolls. 

Informed by lies about noncitizens voting, these voter purges are yet another example of voter suppression efforts that have a disproportionate chilling effect on marginalized and vulnerable communities. Indeed, these efforts foster distrust that increases the threat of violence and sense of fear at polling places — and are thinly disguised attempts to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens, keeping lawfully registered voters from the polls or risking that eligible voters will feel or be unable to seek assistance — such as language assistance — when voting. And these false narratives, fueled by politicians like former President Trump and J.D. Vance, villainize immigrants and people of color — and stoke violence targeted at those communities.

These lies ultimately undermine the electoral process

But the utility of these lies to the authoritarian movement does not end with suppressing the vote in immigrant communities. As the movement has repeatedly telegraphed, the plan is to use these lies as a pretext to suggest election results are not trustworthy, allowing the movement to undermine and challenge the results in November.

Since 2020, we’ve seen a sustained effort to foment distrust in our electoral systems and of the officials who administer them. Think about the cascade of lies this movement has spread since 2020: that Dominion voting machines manipulated votes; that illegal ballots were counted in places like Atlanta, Milwaukee, Phoenix and Detroit; that “ballot mules” stuffed ballot drop-boxes, to name just a few. (Litigation, including our own, has been successful at debunking and securing accountability for spreading many of these lies, necessitating the creation of new ones.) Lies about noncitizen voting are just another way of advancing the false narrative that U.S. elections have and will be “stolen.” 

How it happens

The movement’s top priority: suppress the vote. In addition to targeting communities with large populations of people of color and recently naturalized citizens, state officials have and will rely on these lies to oppose efforts to increase voter turnout. We have already seen this in Texas, which is suing to stop local governments from undertaking measures to increase voter registration among eligible members of their communities. 

Then, legitimize election meddling and gum up the process with last-minute list maintenance and voter challenges that could impact thousands of voters and leave previously lawfully registered voters unable to cast a ballot. These lies could create mountains of work for already under-resourced local election officials, potentially leading to delays in registration, mailing of ballots, and ballot processing.

Finally, subvert the election itself: In the event that the American people do not elect Donald Trump president on November 5, these lies could contribute a false rationale for unlawfully refusing to certify the election results. 

These threats are serious and scary, but we can push back. When these lies come up with our families and in our communities, let’s share the truth: Non-citizens are not voting in our elections, are already prohibited from doing so by state and federal law, and lies to the contrary are intended to undermine a free and fair 2024 election.