A spate of GOP-led inquiries in the weeks leading up to Election Day tell a different story: Noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare.
Former President Donald Trump and Republican leaders across the country have for months characterized the alleged scourge of noncitizen voting as a pressing threat to a free and fair election, using heated rhetoric to suggest that widespread illegal voting could tilt the scales toward Democrats in November.
But a spate of GOP-led inquiries in the weeks leading up to Election Day tell a different story, one that experts have long insisted is true: Noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare.
Recent audits of voter rolls in states including Georgia, Ohio, and Iowa uncovered instances of noncitizen voting that overall amounted to only a tiny fraction of the states’ overall number of registered voters.
A comprehensive audit of Georgia’s voter rolls — which include 8.2 million registered voters — uncovered 20 noncitizens who registered to vote, including nine instances when noncitizens actually cast a ballot. A similar audit of Iowa’s 2.3 million voter revealed 87 instances where individuals cast ballots and later self-reported as noncitizens.
In Ohio, the state’s attorney general, Dave Yost, recently announced indictments against six alleged noncitizens who had voted in a national election, after Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose identified 597 alleged noncitizens who had registered to vote in the state. Each of the six defendants were lawful residents but lacked citizenship when they voted.
«Irregularities like this are rare, and this is a small number of cases», Yost said on Tuesday. «We should all be confident in the upcoming election, knowing that the laws are being enforced and will continue to be enforced.»
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The nationwide push to root out noncitizen voting comes as Trump has made noncitizen voting a key part of his campaign message, telling his supporters that undocumented immigrants are set to vote in record numbers during the upcoming presidential election.
«Our elections are bad», Trump said at the ABC News presidential debate in September.
