After reviewing state voter rolls going back to the 1980s, Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state announced this month that “non-citizens illegally registering or voting is not a systemic problem in Louisiana.” That finding aligns with years of research showing that, with vanishingly rare exceptions, only American citizens vote in American elections.
As part of what Secretary Nancy Landry called an ongoing investigation of potential noncitizen voting, officials ran the state’s voter files through the SAVE program, a federal tool that checks individuals’ citizenship status. In voting records dating back to the 1980s, Landry’s office identified up to 390 registered voters who could be noncitizens. Of those, 79 voted at least once during that more than 40-year period. However, list-matching alone — whether with SAVE or any other database, all of which contain flaws — isn’t enough to identify ineligible voters, let alone voter fraud. That’s why Landry has rightly acknowledged that the actual number could be even lower, as some of the potential noncitizen voter registrations flagged by the SAVE program could be the result of outdated or inaccurate data.
To put that number in perspective, we estimate that at least 74 million votes have been cast in Louisiana since the 1980s — and that estimate is a significant undercount due to data limitations. In other words, out of tens of millions of ballots cast in Louisiana over more than 40 years, only a tiny fraction of them were possibly cast by noncitizens, and even those cases are unconfirmed….