2024 Election Fact Check: Foreigners Can’t Vote and Such Cases Are ‘Disappearingly Rare’

Former President Donald Trump and Republican Party leaders across the country have for months characterized the alleged scourge of non-citizen voting as a pressing threat to free and fair elections, using heated rhetoric to suggest that widespread illegal voting could tip the scales toward Democrats in November.

But a flurry of GOP inquiries in the weeks leading up to Election Day tells a different story, one that experts say is true: Voting without citizenship is extremely rare.

Recent voter roll audits in states including Georgia, Ohio and Iowa revealed non-citizen voting cases that, overall, represented only a small fraction of the states’ total number of registered voters.

A comprehensive audit of Georgia’s voter rolls – covering 8.2 million registered voters – revealed that 20 foreigners registered to vote, including nine cases in which noncitizens actually cast ballots. A similar audit of 2.3 million voters in Iowa revealed 87 cases in which people cast ballots and later self-identified as foreigners.

In Ohio, State Attorney General Dave Yost recently announced indictments against six alleged non-citizens who voted in national elections after Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose identified 597 alleged non-citizens who registered to vote in the state. Each of the six defendants was a legal resident but not a citizen at the time of the vote.

“Such irregularities are rare and a small number of cases,” Yost said Tuesday. “We should all have confidence in the upcoming elections, knowing that the laws are and will be enforced.”

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The nationwide effort to eradicate non-citizen voting comes as Trump has made non-citizen voting a key part of his campaign message, telling his supporters that undocumented immigrants will vote in record numbers in the upcoming presidential election.

“Our elections are bad,” Trump said during the September presidential debate on ABC News. “And a lot of illegal immigrants who come here, they try to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English, they don’t even know what country they are practically in, and these people are trying to get them to vote and that’s why they allow them to come to our country.”

But because foreigners voting in national elections is already illegal and rare, critics have pointed to Trump’s rhetoric and focus on foreigners voting as an attempt to deliberately sow distrust and create potential grounds for legal action to challenge the election results.

“What this amounts to is a vanishingly rare occurrence that will have no real impact on the outcome of our elections, and for which those who actually violate the law will be held accountable,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, a voting rights expert at the firm Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit think tank. “Both domestics and foreigners are spreading these lies to undermine faith in the U.S. election, some of them in hopes of overturning the result if they are not happy with it.”

According to a 2017 Brennan Center study, from a sample of 23.5 million votes cast in 42 jurisdictions during the 2016 election, election officials identified 30 cases of suspected non-citizen voting that were forwarded for further investigation, representing 0. 0001% of all votes cast. During an audit of Georgia’s 2022 voter rolls, election officials were unable to identify a single instance in which a noncitizen cast a ballot during the election.

The 1996 law, which imposes heavy fines, up to a year in prison and deportation on criminals, prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections, which Morales-Doyle says further discourages crimes.

“The reward is casting one vote in one election,” Morales-Doyle said. “It’s just astonishing that someone who has decided to move themselves and their family to the United States and try to build a life here would risk it all, risk their freedom and their presence in the United States, to cast one vote in one election.”

Although cases of non-citizens voting are rare and severely punished, Trump has made a baseless claim that Democrats are allowing illegal immigration to encourage voter fraud in the upcoming election – a claim echoed by GOP allies such as House Speaker Mike Johnson.

“I think ultimately they hope to turn all illegal citizens into voters for their side. It sounds ominous, but there is no other explanation for what’s going on down there,” said Johnson, who last month unsuccessfully tried to pass the SAVE Act requiring documented proof of citizenship to vote.

Election experts have raised concerns that states are using unreliable data to flag and remove ineligible voters, which could inadvertently ensnare eligible voters — like Alabama resident Roald Hazelhoff, who became a citizen two years ago.

As Hazelhoff – who emigrated from the Netherlands in the 1970s before setting down roots in Alabama and raising three children – was preparing to vote in his first national election earlier this year, he received a letter from the Alabama Secretary of State saying informed him that he was not entitled to vote.

“It’s intimidating,” Hazelhoff told ABC News of the letter that referred him to potential criminal prosecution because he registered to vote even though he received a non-citizen identification number decades ago.

“If it happens in Venezuela, that’s to be expected,” he said. “This shouldn’t be happening here. It just shouldn’t be.”

Over the past month, the Justice Department successfully stopped Alabama and Virginia from purging suspected foreigners from voter rolls because the purges violate federal law that prohibits states from removing names from voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Federal judges in both states ordered election officials to restore the registration of thousands of voters, including Hazelhoff.

“There is evidence that a very small percentage of people and organizations are trying to derail the democratic process, and this is an example of that,” Hazelhoff said. “It’s the wrong approach, but it’s also dangerous and intimidating.”