Election fact check: Noncitizens can't vote, and instances are 'vanishingly 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 voters 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."

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. "And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English, they don't know even know what country they're in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that's why they're allowing them to come into our country."

But with noncitizen voting in national elections already illegal and rare, critics have pointed to Trump's rhetoric and the national focus on noncitizen voting as an attempt to intentionally sow distrust and lay the potential groundwork for litigation to challenge the results of the election.

"It amounts to a vanishingly rare phenomenon that is not going to impact the outcome of our elections in any real way, and where the people who actually are violating the law are held accountable," said Sean Morales-Doyle, a voting rights expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit think tank. "Both domestic and foreign folks are spreading these lies in order to undermine faith in American elections -- some of them with the hope of overturning the result if they're not happy about it."

Across a sample of 23.5 million votes cast in 42 jurisdictions during the 2016 election, election officials identified 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting that were referred for further investigation, comprising 0.0001% of the total votes cast, according to a 2017 Brennan Center study. When Georgia audited its voter rolls in 2022, election officials were unable to identify a single instance of a noncitizen casting a ballot during an election.

Noncitizens are prohibited from voting in federal elections by a 1996 law that penalizes offenders with heavy fines, up to one year in prison, and deportation, which Morales-Doyle says further disincentives the crime.

"The payoff is casting one ballot in one election," Morales-Doyle said. "It is just mind-boggling to think that someone who has decided to move themselves and their family to the United States and try to build a life here is going to risk all of that, risk their freedom and their presence in the United States, to cast one ballot in one election."

Despite instances of noncitizen voting being rare and steeply penalized, Trump has made baseless claims that Democrats are allowing illegal immigration to encourage voter fraud in the upcoming election -- a claim echoed by Republican allies such as House Speaker Mike Johnson.

"I think that ultimately they hope to turn all these illegals into voters for their side. It sounds sinister, but there's no other explanation for what's happening down there," said Johnson, who last month unsuccessfully tried to pass the SAVE Act to require documented proof of citizenship to vote.

Election experts have expressed concerns about states using unreliable data to flag and purge ineligible voters, which can accidentally ensnare eligible voters -- such as Alabama resident Roald Hazelhoff, who became a citizen two years ago.

As Hazelhoff -- who immigrated from Holland in the 1970s before putting down roots in Alabama and raising three children -- was preparing to cast his ballot in his first national election earlier this year, he received a letter from the Alabama secretary of state notifying him that he was ineligible to vote.

"This is intimidating," Hazelhoff told ABC News about the letter, which referred him for potential criminal prosecution because he registered to vote despite being previously issued a noncitizen identification number decades ago.

"If it happens in Venezuela, then you might expect a little bit of that," he said. "It should not be happening here. It just shouldn't."

Over the last month, the Department of Justice successfully stopped Alabama and Virginia from removing suspected noncitizens from their voter rolls because the purges violate federal law prohibiting states from striking names from voter registrations within 90 days of an election. Federal judges in both states have ordered election officials to restore the voter registrations of thousands of voters, including Hazelhoff.

"The evidence is out there that there is a very small percentage of individuals and organizations that are trying to derail the democratic process, and this is an example of it," Hazelhoff said. "It's misguided but it's also dangerous and it's intimidating."