Non-Citizen Voting Frequency
Reuters claims that “voting by noncitizens” isn’t “rampant in America” because a “Reuters data analysis” only “reveals” a “small number of often inadvertent violations.”
IN FACT, Reuters ignored the vast bulk of voting by non-citizens by failing to account for the widespread identity fraud of illegal immigrants. Here are the specifics:
- Despite explicit laws against identity fraud by immigrants, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration estimated in 2013 that 700,000 illegal immigrants worked in 2010 by using Social Security numbers obtained by using “fraudulent birth certificates.”
- The same study found that another 1.8 million unauthorized immigrants worked in 2010 by using Social Security numbers “that did not match their name,” thus circumventing the federal I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification system.
- In 2017, California Senate Leader Kevin De Leon (D) stated during a Public Safety Committee hearing that “half of my family” could be deported under Trump’s executive order on illegal immigrant identity fraud 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.”
- In 2005, the New York Times reported, “Currently available for about $150 on street corners in just about any immigrant neighborhood in California, a typical fake ID package includes a green card and a Social Security card.”
- In 2002, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published an investigation of identity fraud by immigrants which found that “the use of fraudulent documents by aliens is extensive,” “significant numbers of aliens unauthorized to work in the United States have used fraudulent documents to circumvent the employment verification process designed to prevent employers from hiring them,” and immigration officials in Los Angeles once “seized nearly two million counterfeit documents” like “permanent resident cards and Social Security cards, which were headed for distribution points around the country.”
- Furthermore, states like New Jersey have loose voter registration laws that don’t require Social Security numbers and accept identifications like a “store membership ID,” “student ID,” or “rent receipt.”
- Reuters’ analysis of illegal voting by non-citizens only examines convictions for this crime, thereby ignoring all votes cast by illegal immigrants with fraudulent identities that have enabled millions of them to live and work in the United States.
- Such people are invisible to typical voter fraud crosschecks because the fraud occurred upstream from the checkpoints, and there is nothing in the voter registration system that identifies them as non-citizens.
- In contrast to studies based on narrow measures like convictions, three comprehensive scientific surveys of non-citizens combined with voter registration records show that roughly 10% to 27% of them are illegally registered to vote, and about half of this subset turns out to vote, amounting to about 1.0 million to 2.7 million illegal votes cast in 2024.
- Attempts by numerous organizations to refute those survey-based studies failed to produce a single legitimate objection, and they resorted to using arguments that suffer from 12 fatal flaws. This includes NPR, Snopes, PolitiFact, NewsGuard, the BBC, the Cato Institute, the New York Times, and the Center for an Informed Public.
