Noncitizens don't vote in US elections. Why does Donald Trump keep insisting they do?
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger released the results of a voting audit last week, debunking a myth perpetuated by Donald Trump and other Republican leaders: that millions of non-U.S. citizens vote in American elections.
The audit revealed that only 20 noncitizens were registered to vote in Georgia out of 8.2 million registered voters. That’s less than 0.0003% of registered voters—not exactly a smoking gun of election fraud. Only nine had ever voted in previous elections. Election officials have since canceled their registrations and referred them to district attorneys for possible prosecution.
Time and time again, it’s been proven that noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare – hard data, election experts, and the courts have all come to this conclusion. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies from crying election fraud, placing the blame squarely with undocumented immigrants.
“This myth of noncitizen voting has really become the centerpiece of the 2024 movement to undermine the election and discredit the results,” Jonathan Diaz of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center told Paste BN. “It’s a coordinated political effort to scapegoat immigrants as the cause of any electoral defeats Donald Trump and his allies may sustain.”
Though proponents of the myth may be louder this election, it isn’t a new tactic.
In 2016, Trump claimed he would have secured the popular vote if undocumented immigrants had not cast ballots for his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Offering no proof, Trump complained that he would have won the popular vote, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
This is false. According to an analysis conducted by the Brennan Center of 42 voting jurisdictions in the 2016 election, officials only referred 30 suspected cases of noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast. The Brennan Center concluded that noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001% of those jurisdiction’s votes in the 2016 presidential election.
So why continue to push this anti-immigrant conspiracy theory if it’s so easily disproved?
Because Trump wants to “create a socialized lie” to make it easier to challenge the 2024 election results, said Anna Dorman, an attorney with the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy.
“They repeat it again and again and again to create this sense in the public that there’s some sort of ‘there, there.’ That there’s some sort of problem,” she said.
Dorman believes that most Americans, if asked, wouldn’t be able to point to a specific claim of voter fraud from the 2020 election that they believe is true.
“But people have a generalized sense that there was voter fraud. And I think that’s precisely what they’re trying to do around noncitizens in 2024,” Dorman said. “They want to use that socialized lie they’ve created to challenge the results or refuse to certify them if the election doesn’t go their way.”
Mass challenges and purging voter rolls
Accusing noncitizens of election fraud isn’t just about spinning a narrative, either. It’s resulting in concrete actions that disenfranchise voters.
Across the country, so-called “election integrity” activists are filing last-minute challenges to voters’ registrations and demanding purges of voter rolls.
In Georgia alone, over 63,000 voters have had their eligibility challenged since July 1, the Associated Press found. Just 1% of those challenges merited further action, with election boards rejecting most of the claims.
State officials are also getting behind the efforts. In Alabama, during a sweeping attempt to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls, the secretary of state revoked hundreds of U.S. citizens’ voter registrations. The same happened in Virginia, when state officials tried to automatically cancel the voter registration of suspected noncitizens. Both efforts were struck down in court this month.
Diaz said the majority of these mass challenges are based on faulty, outdated, or incomplete databases. Most often, they’re targeting newly naturalized citizens or people with Latino surnames.
“It’s creating a real chilling effect on immigrant communities, on new Americans, who are getting swept up in these mass challenges and illegal voter purges,” Diaz said.
Though the challenges may not be standing up to legal scrutiny now, they might get a second life after the election, Dorman told Paste BN.
Dorman and her colleagues at Protect Democracy are particularly concerned about what the group calls “zombie lawsuits.”
Many of the mass challenges to voter rolls are still making their way through the court system and won’t be decided before Nov. 5, but could be “resurrected as if they represent live, important issues” that needed to be ruled on before certifying the election.
“I worry a lot about people being able to launder these lies through the court system,” Dorman said, “in the name of chasing down nonexistent noncitizen voting.”
Melissa Cruz is an elections reporting fellow who focuses on voter access issues for the Paste BN Network. You can reach her at mcruz@gannett.com or on X, formerly Twitter, at @MelissaWrites22.