Although it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in state and local elections in Iowa, voters in that state will decide in November whether to approve a constitutional amendment that would bar localities from allowing noncitizens to vote. Iowa is one of eight states with ballot measures blocking state and local governments from allowing noncitizen voting this year. In addition to Iowa, the states are Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (The Missouri measure would also ban ranked-choice voting.)
All eight are expected to pass easily. Similar measures have passed in six other states since 2018. “According to our polling, there is overwhelming support for only citizens voting, regardless of ideology,” says Jack Tomczak, vice president of outreach at Americans for Citizen Voting. “It’s one of the rare issues in today’s politics that has an overwhelming majority of Americans who support it.”
There may be general support, but the issue is being pushed hard during this campaign season by some conservative voices. Outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax have aired dozens of segments suggesting that voting by noncitizens is a rampant problem. Last month, as part of a spending bill to keep the federal government open, House Republicans attempted to include the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, which would require voters to show proof of citizenship when registering for federal elections.
The House had passed the SAVE Act in July. Former President Donald Trump suggested that Congress should shut down the government if it couldn’t pass the SAVE Act. "Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote," Trump said during the presidential debate last month.
Democrats say the issue is completely overblown. It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in state and federal elections, while it’s legal for permanent legal residents to vote in school board or other local elections in fewer than 20 municipalities.
“This is a pretty transparently political effort to play on people’s fears and prejudices to undermine faith in our elections,” says Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy at the Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights legal organization. “This is all just laying the groundwork for future claims that the election was somehow stolen or the election results can’t be trusted.”
Even though noncitizen voting is illegal, Republican state Sen. Brad Overcash of North Carolina said that the ballot measures will "empower" voters in eight states "to make the decision to amend their own constitution, to declare that citizens, and only citizens, are allowed to vote."
Claims Without Evidence
Trump has hammered away at this issue throughout his political career. Even after he won in 2016, Trump said he would have carried the popular vote if not for 3 to 5 million people he claimed had voted illegally.
“Immigration and election fraud are really the two things he talks about the most,” says Lorraine Minnite, a political scientist at Rutgers University.
In 2020, Trump again claimed people voting illegally had cost him politically. In a filing unsealed last week, special counsel Jack Smith accuses Trump of knowingly making false claims about the election, citing claims about noncitizen voting as an example:
"The conspirators started with the allegation that 36,000 noncitizens voted in Arizona; five days later, it was ‘beyond credulity that a few hundred thousand didn’t vote’; three weeks later, ‘the bare minimum [was] 40 or 50,000. The reality is about 250,000’; days after that, the assertion was 32,000; and ultimately, the conspirators landed back where they started, at 36,000 — a false figure that they never verified or corroborated.”
Recently, statewide officials in Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Texas have said that hundreds or even thousands of noncitizens have attempted to register or vote. Over the years, such claims have proven to be exaggerated. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, for example, said that 1,634 noncitizens attempted to register to vote between 1997 and 2022, but in each case election officials prevented them. A state audit found that no noncitizens cast votes in 2022.
Last month, the Justice Department (DOJ) sued Alabama for purging more than 3,000 people from its voting rolls the state claimed were noncitizens. DOJ says that Alabama had misidentified at least a quarter of them as noncitizens.
Why such discrepancies? There’s often error in matching names using databases, Minnite says, with middle initials or hyphens appearing in one place and not another, while individual records may not be up-to-date. “Most people who naturalize don’t call the DMV to say, ‘I’m a citizen now,’” says Diaz of the Campaign Legal Center.
In announcing his state’s purge, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen conceded that “it is possible that some of the individuals who were issued noncitizen identification numbers have, since receiving them, become naturalized citizens and are, therefore, eligible to vote.”
Not Worth the Risk
In November, voters in Santa Ana, Calif., will decide whether to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. The argument is that if residents pay taxes and use services, they ought to have a say.
In 2022, noncitizen residents of Washington, D.C., were given the right to vote in local elections, starting this year. The House passed a measure to repeal the policy in May, though it's unlikely it will advance through the Democratic-controlled Senate. New York City also passed a law allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, but it’s been blocked in court.
Tomczak, of Americans for Citizen Voting, stresses that the issue of municipalities allowing noncitizens to vote legally is distinct from the issue of noncitizens voting illegally. “There’s been a significant uptick in legalizing noncitizen voting,” he says. “We’re looking at getting ahead of it," he says, referring to the state ballot measures.
There are already safeguards in place to flag and catch noncitizens from voting in every state, as well as at the federal level. Noncitizens who cast a vote face the possibility of prison time or deportation. “Those penalties work,” Diaz says. “People are not going to risk being removed from this country.”
