This week, President Trump called on his party to nationalize American elections, an unconstitutional move that he said would be justified because of the danger of noncitizens casting ballots. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” he said.
No president has so baldly proposed to intervene in state elections, but the charge that noncitizens are illegally casting ballots is sadly commonplace. Elon Musk claims on X, without evidence, that significant numbers of illegal immigrants vote. Rudy Giuliani erroneously alleged that my home state, Arizona, had allowed “probably about 250,000” votes from noncitizens in 2020, despite the fact that Arizona has long required proof of citizenship to vote in state elections.
Election officials usually respond to these allegations by pointing out that there are almost no prosecutions of fraudulent noncitizen voters. Reuters has noted that even the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation’s database of election crimes listed only 24 instances of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections from 2003 to 2023.
While these rebuttals are correct, they are incomplete: Just because something isn’t prosecuted doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Happily, there is new compelling evidence debunking the false claims. Recently, a number of states have undertaken investigations into noncitizen voting, cross-checking voter rolls with citizenship status, and found it virtually nonexistent.
When confronted with allegations on noncitizens...
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