Miles Parks for NPR:
After President Trump and many other Republicans warned that vast numbers of non-U.S. citizens would influence last year’s election, states and law enforcement have devoted more resources than ever before to root out those ineligible voters.
More than six months into Trump’s second term, they haven’t found much.
New research out Wednesday tracking state government efforts across the country confirms what election experts have said all along: Noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way.
“Noncitizens are not a large threat to our election system currently,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which conducted the research. “Even states that are looking everywhere to try to amplify the numbers of noncitizens … when they actually look, they find a surprisingly, shockingly small number.”
CEIR spent roughly four months reviewing states’ public disclosures about noncitizen voting, stretching back years. The organization shared its findings with NPR exclusively.
The report shows a wide disparity in how states have investigated the issue and what data officials in those states choose to make public. Many states have released no information, even though it’s illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and all voting officials do some type of maintenance to their voter rolls.
Some states, such as Michigan and Georgia, have undertaken audits of their entire voter rolls, using resources from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to check for noncitizens. Michigan officials announced in April that a review found that “cases of noncitizens casting a ballot in Michigan elections are extremely rare.” The review found more than a dozen noncitizens appear to have illegally voted in the 2024 general election. That’s 0.00028% of the state’s total votes….
No state has found any coordinated effort to get noncitizens to vote in the 2024 election.
When UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen was presented with the CEIR findings, he said he wasn’t “surprised in the slightest.”
“It really is not a big problem, both because on the individual level, it would be hard to get noncitizens to agree to it,” Hasen said. “And on the broader level, it’s just not a very cost-effective way to try to steal an election.”
Election officials note there are safeguards to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote, but the biggest deterrent is the fact that immigrants without legal status generally don’t want to risk deportation to cast one ballot — especially because the inherent paper trail of voting makes it very easy to get caught.
Separate research has found that when noncitizens do register to vote, it’s often due to bureaucratic errors or a misunderstanding about eligibility, as opposed to intentional fraud.
Still, the noncitizen voting myth has persisted for more than 100 years in American elections. Hasen expects it to come up again in 2026, even if states don’t find any data to support it.
“Most people who make claims that noncitizen voting is a big problem are doing so for political purposes,” Hasen said. “It’s a way of demonizing immigrants. It’s a way of trying to claim that Democrats cheat. And no amount of evidence is going to stop people from making politically expedient claims.”