In a recent article on the site UnPopulist, my Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson (who is an expert on election law) explains why right-wing claims that noncitizens vote illegally in large numbers are a myth:
If you believe Elon Musk, the “Democrats” are purposely allowing large numbers of immigrants into the country to win elections. “Introducing a large number of illegal immigrants,” he wrote on X March 5, “they are importing voters.” Even if the Democrats deport many people present illegally, they cannot be sincere in this effort Why “every deportation is a lost vote.” Musk’s co-thinker on this topic, former President Donald Trump, said in January in Iowa: “That’s why they’re allowing these people in—people who don’t speak our language—they’re registering them to vote.” And a television ad by Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance claims that current border policies mean “more Democratic voters flocking to this country.” “Treason indeed!” Musk exclaims.
All of these men know – even if they often don’t admit it in their comments – that it is already completely illegal for anyone other than a citizen to vote in federal elections. (Some municipalities allow noncitizens to vote in local races such as those for city council and school board.) I suppose their unstated premise might be that a future general amnesty would combine with a mass naturalization decree to allow the an end to these millions from voting legally. . This would require an act of Congress that would go far beyond Reagan’s amnesty or any other step in memory and would certainly not be conceivable in current politics.
In fact, they are promoting the claim, long-standing under Trump, that noncitizens already vote in large numbers….
For four years, the Justice Department reported to Donald Trump, who had railed against voter fraud. As far as I could tell from the news, the largest non-citizen voting prosecution occurred in 2020 in North Carolina, where a federal grand jury, following a DHS investigation, indicted 19 people of multiple nationalities for having voted in the state’s federal elections. election. That’s 19 too many people to have voted, assuming the charges were successful, but it’s unlikely to have changed the results given that more than 3.6 million people voted in North Carolina’s 2018 election ….
You might also pause to note that the Trump administration created a commission on voter fraud that, like every other actor that has investigated the matter, has been unable to document large-scale violations of the law. (The Heritage Foundation’s much-cited database of voting irregularities, when recently audited, included about 85 cases involving noncitizens since 2002.)
State-level prosecutions in this area are equally rare. Are the states also somehow involved in the conspiracy? It seems hard to believe that they can all be. For starters, many states with large populations of noncitizens, such as Texas and Florida, have been run by Republicans for decades, as have their attorneys general’s offices.
Walter goes on to point out several additional reasons why claims of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens are implausible.
I would just add a couple of points to your analysis. First, recruiting thousands of noncitizens to participate in illegal voting would require a vast operation that would be extremely difficult to keep secret and otherwise pull off successfully. All those involved would risk serious criminal liability, which would encourage all captured participants to testify against others involved, in order to obtain lighter sentences.
Secrecy would be even more difficult to maintain in light of the fact that the Republican Party (like the Democrats) employs a veritable army of lawyers and election observers whose duties include trying to ferret out any cheating on the part of the opposition. If Democrats (or anyone else) were involved in a vast conspiracy to commit voter fraud, these GOP operatives should have been able to find evidence of it. Of course they didn’t.
Second, any long-term Democratic plan to turn noncitizens into voters would have to deal with the fact that even legal immigrants must (in most cases) wait at least five years to become citizens eligible to vote, and even then they have to take a civics test that most Native Americans would fail if they were to take it without studying. Congress could potentially pass a statute relaxing or eliminating these requirements. But this would represent a more serious political step forward than conventional legalization of the status.
There are real problems plaguing American democracy. Walter and I examine potential solutions to some of them in the Team Libertarian Report for the National Constitution Center’s “Guardrails of Democracy” project (we co-authored the report with another Cato colleague, Clark Neily). But the spread of illegal voting by noncitizens is not a real problem. It’s just another bogus conspiracy theory in an age that has far too many.