How Many Illegal Immigrants Voted? Numbers, Audits, and Claims

Every credible study, state audit, and federal review has found that the number of illegal immigrants and other noncitizens who have voted in U.S. elections is extremely small, generally somewhere between 0.0001 percent and 0.001 percent of ballots cast. Noncitizen voting in federal and state elections is illegal, and researchers across the political spectrum agree the incidence has never come close to changing an election outcome.¹²

The National Numbers

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization that maintains a database of proven voter-fraud cases, has documented between 23 and 77 instances of noncitizen voting over roughly two decades, depending on the date range examined. Those cases sit within a database of about 1,546 total fraud entries. According to the American Immigration Council’s review of the same data, only 10 involved undocumented immigrants, and the total amounts to less than 0.0001 percent of the more than one billion votes cast in the United States during the same period.³⁴

A Brennan Center study of the 2016 general election looked at 42 jurisdictions overseeing 23.5 million votes. Election officials referred roughly 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for investigation, about 0.0001 percent of the ballots cast in those places. In 40 of the 42 jurisdictions, officials identified zero incidents.⁵ The New York Times found two possible instances of noncitizen voting out of 137.7 million votes cast that year. The Washington Post found zero.¹

A Center for Election Innovation and Research review of public state disclosures around the 2024 election found that 18 states had not disclosed finding or removing any noncitizen voters from their rolls at all.⁶

What State Audits Have Found

Individual states have run their own reviews, and the results are strikingly consistent.

Michigan: A review of the 2024 general election identified 15 people who appeared to be noncitizens and cast ballots. That works out to 0.00028 percent of the state’s 5.7 million votes. Thirteen cases were referred to the attorney general.⁷
Georgia: A 2024 citizenship audit of 8.2 million registered voters identified 20 noncitizens who had registered. Nine had cast ballots in prior elections, most before the state added enhanced citizenship verification in 2012.²
Louisiana: A 2025 investigation identified 390 noncitizen registrants out of 2.9 million. Seventy-nine had voted at least once since the 1980s, against an estimated 74 million or more total ballots cast in the state during that period.⁴⁸
Ohio: Between 2019 and September 2023, 521 cases of potential noncitizen voting were flagged. An Ohio Capital Journal review found only one produced a voter-fraud charge; most flags were traced to accidental registration or delays in updating citizenship status after naturalization.²
Utah: A review of roughly 2.1 million registered voters between April 2025 and January 2026 found one confirmed noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting.²
Idaho: A 2024 test of one million voters found 36 registrants who were “very likely” noncitizens, roughly 0.001 percent of the total.⁴
Texas: After running voter rolls against the federal SAVE database in October 2025, the secretary of state’s office flagged 2,724 registered voters as potential noncitizens. Reporting found that at least 87 voters across 29 counties had been misidentified, and more than five percent of flagged voters in a survey of 97 counties turned out to be citizens.⁹¹⁰

Officials from both parties describe the pattern the same way. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said after her state’s 2024 review that “our careful review confirms what we already knew — that this illegal activity is very rare.”⁷ Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican who once personally uncovered hundreds of noncitizen registrations in Philadelphia traced to a state Department of Transportation error, has said “all evidence suggests that noncitizens voting in elections in the United States occurs very rarely” and that “there’s no evidence to suggest that it happens in any widespread way whatsoever.” He described the Philadelphia cases, which he called “one of the largest instances of illegal noncitizen voting in recent history,” as “only a fraction of a percent” of the city’s roughly 800,000 registered voters.¹¹ The Bipartisan Policy Center concluded that there is “no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”²

Why the Number Stays This Small

Federal law has prohibited noncitizen voting in federal elections since 1996. Under 18 U.S.C. § 611, noncitizens who vote face up to one year in prison and fines up to $100,000. A single illegal vote can also trigger deportation, revocation of legal immigration status, and denial of future naturalization. Even registering under a false claim of citizenship can carry immigration consequences, whether or not a ballot is ever cast.¹²¹³

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 also requires anyone registering to attest to U.S. citizenship under penalty of perjury. States verify eligibility through driver’s license documentation, cross-references against Social Security Administration records, and, in 23 states, the federal SAVE system operated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Some states also check jury-duty dismissal records, since people excused from jury service for lack of citizenship can be flagged.² For a noncitizen, the risk of losing legal status over one ballot is what experts describe as an overwhelmingly discouraging trade.

The One Study That Claimed Otherwise

Nearly every claim of large-scale noncitizen voting traces back to a single 2014 study by Jesse Richman and Gulshan Chattha, published in Electoral Studies. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the authors argued that a small but meaningful share of noncitizens voted in the 2008 and 2010 elections, enough to influence outcomes including the Senate’s 60th vote for health care reform.¹⁴

The study was challenged almost immediately. A team led by Stephen Ansolabehere at Harvard used the same survey’s panel data to show the results were an artifact of survey measurement error. In a sample where 97.4 percent of respondents are citizens, even a tiny misclassification rate of 0.1 percent produces enough misidentified “noncitizens” to account for the entire observed voting rate. When the researchers narrowed the analysis to respondents who consistently identified as noncitizens across both waves of the survey, they found zero validated voters. Their conclusion: “the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.”¹⁵ Richman himself later provided substantially reduced estimates in Arizona litigation, putting noncitizen registration rates likely below one percent and voting rates at roughly half that.¹⁶

Recent Claims of Mass Illegal Voting

During and after the 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump and other Republicans alleged that Democrats were encouraging migrants to enter the country to vote illegally. In early 2025, Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias, working through the Department of Government Efficiency, said they had matched Social Security numbers issued to noncitizens under the Enumeration Beyond Entry program against voter rolls in unnamed states and found “thousands” of crossovers. Representative Aaron Bean cited DOGE findings on the House floor, claiming “evidence” that millions of people admitted during the Biden administration were “participating in our elections.”¹⁷

DOGE never released the underlying evidence. Court records later showed that a DOGE team member had executed a “voter data agreement” with a political advocacy group without proper authorization from the Social Security Administration, and that a federal court issued a restraining order in March 2025 barring DOGE employees from accessing SSA data.¹⁸ In a January 2026 filing, the Department of Justice acknowledged that the DOGE team had engaged with a political advocacy group seeking to compare SSA data against state voter rolls to find fraud evidence and “overturn election results in certain states.”¹⁹

Election data specialists called the claims unreliable. Charles Stewart of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab and David Bier of the Cato Institute noted that matching databases by names and birthdates without additional safeguards produces high rates of false matches. Cato’s Walter Olson said state audits have consistently found noncitizen voting to be “tiny in relation to votes cast” and insufficient to alter the outcome of any recent federal election.¹⁷

When the Search for Noncitizen Voters Sweeps in Citizens

One episode illustrates the accuracy problem behind aggressive removal efforts. In August 2024, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced a program to remove 3,251 registered voters identified as having been issued noncitizen identification numbers. Voting rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice sued. In October 2024, U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco issued a preliminary injunction halting the purge, citing what appeared to be an error rate above 50 percent and noting that the list included “thousands of United States citizens.” At least 717 people who had been purged were confirmed to be lawfully registered U.S. citizens.²⁰²¹ The case was voluntarily dismissed in March 2025 after the state agreed to shut down the program.²² A similar pattern showed up in Texas, where at least 87 flagged voters were later confirmed to be citizens.⁹

Where Noncitizens Can Legally Vote

Noncitizen voting is barred in every state and federal election, but at least 16 municipalities permit noncitizens to vote in certain local contests such as school board or city council races. These jurisdictions are located in California, Maryland, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. Election offices in those places run separate systems so noncitizens cannot cast ballots in state or federal races.²³

Turnout in those local elections is very low. San Francisco, which authorized noncitizen voting in school board elections in 2016, saw minimal participation. Washington, D.C., had roughly 500 noncitizens registered as of May 2024 out of about 105,000 foreign-born residents. Burlington, Vermont, recorded 62 noncitizen voters. Takoma Park, Maryland, recorded 72.¹⁶ Those legal local votes are not part of the noncitizen totals in federal elections and do not change the underlying finding: across the ballots that matter for national and state contests, the number of illegal immigrants and other noncitizens who have voted remains a fraction of a fraction of one percent.

1
Brennan Center for Justice. Noncitizen Voting Is Vanishingly Rare
2
Bipartisan Policy Center. Four Things to Know About Noncitizen Voting
3
American Immigration Council. Myths About Noncitizen Voting: Heritage Foundation Data
4
Cato Institute. Trump’s Claims About Noncitizens Voting Are False
5
Brennan Center for Justice. Noncitizen Voting Is Already Illegal and Vanishingly Rare
6
NPR. Noncitizen Voting Trump CEIR Review
7
Michigan Department of State. Michigan Department of State Review Confirms Instances of Noncitizen Voting Are Extremely Rare
8
Brennan Center for Justice. Louisiana’s Chief Election Official Confirms Lack of Widespread Noncitizen Voting
9
Texas Tribune. SAVE Voter Citizenship Tool Mistakes and Confusion
10
Texas Secretary of State. Secretary of State Voter Roll Audit Announcement
11
Spotlight PA. Noncitizen Voter Fraud Pennsylvania Election Integrity
12
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 U.S.C. § 611 – Voting by Aliens
13
Brennan Center for Justice. Non-Citizens Are Not Voting: Here Are the Facts
14
ScienceDirect. Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections
15
Harvard CCES. The Perils of Cherry Picking Low Frequency Events in Large Sample Surveys
16
Cato Institute. Shedding Light on the Incidence of Illegal Noncitizen Voting
17
FactCheck.org. Musk’s Unsupported Claim to Have Unveiled Massive Illegal Voting by Noncitizens
18
VPM/NPR. How DOGE May Have Improperly Used Social Security Data to Push Voter Fraud Narratives
19
U.S. Senate. SSA Letter Regarding DOGE Activities
20
Alabama Reflector. Federal Judge Blocks Alabama Secretary of State’s Voter Removal Plan
21
Campaign Legal Center. Protecting Alabamians From Voter Purges
22
League of Women Voters. Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice v. Allen
23
Migration Policy Institute. Noncitizen Voting in U.S. Elections