Non-Citizen Voting
NBC News claims that “noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Donald Trump” has “falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.”
IN FACT, scientific surveys of non-citizens combined with voter registration records in 2008, 2012, and 2022 found that roughly 10% to 27% of non-citizens were illegally registered to vote, half of whom turned out to vote. Claims to the contrary suffer from 12 fatal flaws:
- They assert that the non-citizen voters in the surveys were actually citizens who mistakenly identified themselves as non-citizens, but in reality, this claim never had merit and was recently demolished by a verifying survey question that found “an error rate of 0.”
- They invoke the authority of “over 200 political scientists” who said that the survey results are unreliable, but in reality, their argument was based entirely on the discredited claim that citizen voters misidentified themselves as non-citizens.
- They allege that convictions for voter fraud are the only firm evidence on this issue, but in reality, convictions are a highly incomplete measure because the laws are frequently unenforced, and there are large loopholes to avoid them.
- They fail to account for the reality that identity fraud is rampant among illegal immigrants, and California Senate Leader Kevin De Leon (D) publicly stated that “half of my family” could be deported if laws against identity fraud were enforced because “anyone who has family members who are undocumented knows that almost entirely everybody has secured some sort of false identification,” such as “a false Social Security card,” “a false driver’s license,” or “a false green card.”
- They declare that the surveys don’t “constitute a representative sample” of non-citizens, but in reality, the evidence suggests they do.
- They employ mathematically illiterate arguments, like assuming that the main driver of survey statistical power is numerators, when in reality, it is denominators.
- They falsely refer to straightforward applications of survey data as “extrapolations” while often citing similar figures without tagging them with that misleading label.
- They downplay the academic credentials of scholars who conduct studies that find significant rates of illegal voter registration while ignoring the political donations of scholars who contest them.
- They invoke low numbers of cases of voter fraud in the Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database, but in reality, the Heritage Foundation explicitly states that the database is “not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all election fraud” but is merely a “sampling of recent proven” cases.
- They invoke the authority of “the conservative Cato Institute,” but in reality, Cato is a libertarian think tank that lobbies for open borders and has a history of understating illegal voting and other crimes committed by non-citizens.
- They purge hyperlinks when quoting key statements from research on this issue, thus misportraying thoroughly documented facts as unsupported assertions.
- They cite narrow, warped, and futile measures that understate the rate of non-citizen voter registration without disclosing the fallacies, assumptions, and limitations that underlie these measures.
Every illegal vote cast by a non-citizen nullifies the legal vote of a citizen, thereby subverting their Constitutional right to vote. Instead of reporting these facts or mitigating this threat to every citizen’s right to vote, major media outlets, “fact checkers,” certain scholars, and leading Democrats deny this problem exists.
