Do undocumented immigrants vote in US elections? Here’s the data

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House Republicans are considering the idea of ​​forcing a government shutdown over the issue of foreign voting in US elections.

Government funding ends on Sept. 30, and House Speaker Mike Johnson — at the request of former President Donald Trump in social media posts — wants to combine a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running with a bill that would require every American to show proof of citizenship to register to vote.

The funding bill has not yet gained enough support to pass the all-Republican House of Representatives, and Democrats are likely to oppose it.

Johnson, appearing on “The Lead” on Tuesday, did not provide specifics as he argued for the citizenship bill, known as the SAVE Act.

“We have several states that have done audits of their voter rolls and found thousands of noncitizens on their rolls. And that’s in some of the swing states — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia — states that could decide the outcome of the election,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Johnson later mentioned that Texas is a state where undocumented immigrants have tried to register to vote.

“There are a number of states that have shown that they have noncitizens on their rolls. That’s enough to create chaos in elections. And we have to stop it,” he said.

Critics say it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote, and the risk of prosecution and deportation is a deterrent to those who have already made the sacrifice to come to the U.S. It is already good practice in states to check voter registrations against records with the Department of Motor Vehicles or Social Security, and reviews of voter registrations have shown that very few noncitizens attempt to vote.

Voter registration checks are common practice in many states, and in a country of more than 330 million people, there can be some lapses.

“If someone moves out of state, it’s appropriate for that voter registration to be flagged and ultimately removed because they’re no longer an eligible voter in that state. That’s a normal process that happens in every state, blue and red,” David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me in an interview for the What Matters newsletter before Johnson made his comments.

CNN also verified reports of widespread voting among illegal immigrants.

With that in mind, let’s look at the evidence in the specific states Johnson mentions of the infinitesimal number of undocumented people registering to vote or actually voting in U.S. elections.

Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, announced last month that a years-long review of voter registration in Texas, which has nearly 18 million voters, had identified more than 6,500 “potential” foreigners on the rolls. Of those, fewer than 2,000 have a voting history. He referred the latter to the state attorney general’s office “for investigation and potential legal action,” but no one has been charged with illegal voting.

In 2019, a review of the state’s voter registration records seemed to suggest there were 95,000 noncitizens on the rolls. But a closer look showed a different story, according to a Texas Tribune report from the time. Texas used an old list of people who had once told the state they were noncitizens, but it turned out that many of those people had become citizens. Texas agreed to a settlement to end the review.

There have been recent claims that the number of people registering to vote has increased in several states. Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, issued a statement in April debunking those claims and indicating that Texans must provide a driver’s license number or Social Security number to register to vote.

“We know that this system we have is effective,” Becker told me. “States have routinely been conducting background checks on noncitizens for the last few years. They have found literally no citizens who could vote. Even Texas has found only 0.03 percent of potential noncitizens. And given past activity over the last few years, it is likely that every one of them has recently been naturalized.”

In a state with about 8 million registered voters, a recent review of Ohio’s voter registrations resulted in the removal of 154,995 abandoned or inactive voter registrations. A much smaller number, 597, were referred by Secretary of State Frank LaRose to the state attorney general for “further review and potential prosecution” for possibly registering to vote as a noncitizen. But an even smaller number, 138, “appear to have voted in Ohio elections,” he said in a statement.

LaRose, a Republican, wants more power to require proof of citizenship to register voters. No one has been charged with a crime.

“It’s rare. But we keep it rare by enforcing the law,” LaRose said of noncitizens casting ballots during a hearing Wednesday on Capitol Hill where he was pushing for legislation to require proof of citizenship to register.

Making the opposing argument at the same hearing, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, argued that a 2004 referendum initiative that required proof of citizenship to register to vote in his state disenfranchised 47,000 people.

“I am not proud of the fact that we have denied eligible citizens the right to vote in far greater numbers than we would have prevented the extremely rare voting by non-citizens that supposedly occurs throughout the United States of America,” Fontes said.

Even though cases of undocumented people registering or voting are so rare, and the few known cases are referred for prosecution, LaRose said during the hearing that there should be “zero tolerance” because “dozens of elections in Ohio every year come down to one vote. And those are usually local elections, but they matter.”

In 2022, Georgia, which has more than 7 million registered voters, announced the results of the first-ever citizenship check of its voter registrations. A total of 1,634 people “who tried to register to vote could not be verified,” and were given “pending citizenship” status, according to a statement from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican.

None of the challenged registrations were linked to voting in the election, although Raffensperger supports an additional requirement for citizenship verification to register to vote.

In a state with more than 8.6 million registered voters, an admitted glitch in Pennsylvania’s voter registration process allowed noncitizens legally present in the U.S. to unknowingly register to vote for a period of time. Between 2006 and 2017, when the glitch was discovered, at least 168 ineligible people are believed to have registered to vote in Philadelphia, a city of more than 1.5 million people. The glitch’s details come from a Republican member of the city’s election board.

Johnson didn’t mention Kansas, but it’s worth noting that in that state, which has nearly 2 million registered voters, a federal court struck down a 2020 law that would have required proof of citizenship to vote —– because the state planned to force more than 30,000 people to re-register to vote when, according to a report by the Associated Press at the time, only 67 noncitizens had registered or tried to register to vote in 19 years.

The ruling found that of the 39 noncitizens who were actually found on the voter rolls in Kansas, many could be explained by “administrative irregularities.”

Finally, in terms of cases that actually resulted in criminal prosecutions, the conservative Heritage Foundation — which argues that there are too many loopholes in the American election system — has documented a total of 25 voter fraud prosecutions where citizenship was an issue over a 20-year period.