Trump and MAGA Republicans have been falsely claiming that Democrats are purposefully letting migrants into the country so they will vote, which echoes the “Great Replacement Theory.”
In fact, while Trump seized the opportunity in 2016 to make immigration a top MAGA issue with lies about noncitizens voting illegally in national elections, these false claims have been made for over a century.
MAGA Republicans are now making it a priority to update federal law to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, even while millions of eligible voters, about 10%, do not have ready access to documents that prove their citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport.
Where are these false claims about illegal immigrants voting in federal elections coming from?
A widely contested 2014 paper by researchers at Old Dominion University is the primary source.
This study, which was led by political scientist Jesse Richman, drew its conclusions from an online survey known as the Cooperative Election Survey. A small number of respondents had indicated they were noncitizens and that they had voted. Richman’s paper used that data to estimate that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008.
The developers of the survey themselves rebutted Richman’s work, and in detail showed how Richman’s research was methodologically unsound — because the small subset of people who reported being noncitizen voters could easily have been citizens who had simply selected the wrong box.
In 2016, Trump picked up on that Richman survey, and distorted it more, prompting 200 political scientists to write a letter rejecting the Richman 2014 paper. And yet in May, another website called Just Facts doubled down on the junk survey, citing 10% to 27% of noncitizens are illegally registered to vote — potentially four times that of the original junk survey.
Richman has since revised down his estimate for national noncitizen voter registration rates to just under 1%, and participation to half a percent.
The real data shows noncitizen voting is extremely rare.
- The Brennan Center for Justice, following the 2016 election, found in 42 jurisdictions with high immigrant populations there were just 30 cases of suspected noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast, or 0.0001%.
- Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger launched an audit in 2022 that found over the previous 25 years, fewer than 1,700 people believed to be noncitizens had attempted to register to vote. None were able to cast ballots.
- Even the Heritage Foundation has data that shows how rare noncitizen voting is, with 85 cases between 2002 and 2023. A deeper dive on that data found most noncitizen voting cases involve legal immigrants and many had been incorrectly told they could vote.
Report from NPR
