“Fact-check: Did 3 million undocumented immigrants vote in this year’s election?”

Reupping this from Nov. 18 Politifact/Punditfact:

Other research contradicts Phillips’ tweet.

News 21, a national investigative reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, found just 56 cases of noncitizens voting between 2000 and 2011.

A report by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that most cases of noncitizens voting were accidental. “Although there are a few recorded examples in which noncitizens have apparently registered or voted, investigators have concluded that they were likely not aware that doing so was improper,” reads the 2007 report.

States that have tried to purge noncitizens from voter rolls, meanwhile, have found even government data lacking.

In 2012, Florida Governor Rick Scott’s administration started an effort trying to crack down on noncitizens voting by comparing driver’s license data against voter rolls.

Through this process the Florida Department of State created a list of 182,000 potential noncitizens that had voted. That number was whittled down to 2,700, then to about 200 before the purge was stopped amid criticism that the data was flawed given the number of false positives — including a Brooklyn-born World War II vet.

Ultimately, only 85 people were removed from the voting rolls. State officials began to pursue a second attempt at a purge in advance of the 2014 election but then abandoned that effort, too.

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, called Phillips’ claim “fake news.”

“There is no credible evidence I have seen to show large numbers of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections anywhere,” Hasen said. “The idea that 3 million noncitizens could have illegally voted in our elections without being detected is obscenely ludicrous.”

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