What the data actually shows about whether undocumented immigrants vote in US elections

(CNN) — House Republicans are flirting with the idea of forcing a government shutdown over the issue of noncitizens voting in US elections.

Government funding authority runs out on September 30, and House Speaker Mike Johnson — at the all-caps urging of former President Donald Trump in social media posts – wants to pair a temporary spending bill to keep the government running along with a bill that would require proof of citizenship for every American in order to register to vote.

The funding bill does not yet have enough support to make it through the House with just Republicans, and Democrats will likely oppose it.

Appearing Tuesday on “The Lead,” Johnson didn’t get into specific details when he argued in favor of the citizenship legislation, known as the SAVE Act.

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

Johnson also later referenced Texas as a state where undocumented immigrants have tried to register to vote.

“There are a number of states who have shown they have noncitizens on their voter rolls. That is enough to create chaos in the election. And we have to stop it,” he said.

Critics argue it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote and the risk of prosecution and deportation is an effective deterrent for people who have already sacrificed to come to the US. It’s already a best practice for states to check voter registrations against their Department of Motor Vehicles or Social Security files, and reviews of voter rolls have shown very few noncitizens try to vote.

Reviewing voter rolls is a regular thing for states, and in a country of more than 330 million people, there will be a few glitches.

“If someone moves out of the state, it’s proper that that voter registration 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 single 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 has also fact-checked claims of widespread voting by undocumented immigrants.

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

Texas

Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, announced last month that an ongoing, yearslong review of voter rolls in Texas, which has nearly 18 million voters, had identified more than 6,500 “potential” noncitizens on the voter rolls. Of those, less than 2,000 have a voter history. He referred the latter to the state attorney general’s office “for investigation and potential legal action,” but no one has been accused of voting illegally.

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

More recently, there have been claims that the number of people registering to vote in several states has increased. Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, issued a statement in April refuting that claim and pointing out that Texans must provide either a driver’s license number or Social Security number to register to vote.

“We know that this system that we have in place is effective,” Becker told me. “States have routinely done checks for noncitizens in just the last couple of years. They found literally zero noncitizens to cast a vote. Even Texas had found only 0.03% possible noncitizens. And based on previous activity in the last few years, it’s likely that every single one of those had been recently naturalized.”

Ohio

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

LaRose, a Republican, wants more power to require proof of citizenship for voter registration. No one appears to have been charged with any 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 pushed for the legislation to require proof of citizenship to register.

Giving the opposing argument at the same hearing, Arizona’s secretary of state, Democrat Adrian Fontes, argued that a 2004 ballot initiative that created a requirement for proof of citizenship to register to vote in his state had disenfranchised 47,000 people.

“I take no pride in the idea that we have denied eligible citizens the right to vote in far greater numbers than we would have prevented the vanishingly rare noncitizen voting that is alleged to be happening across the United States of America,” Fontes said.

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

Georgia

In 2022, Georgia, which has more than 7 million registered voters, announced the results of the first-ever citizenship review of its voter rolls. It found a grand total of 1,634 people “who had attempted to register to vote were not able to be verified,” according to a statement that year from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican. They were placed into “pending citizenship” status.

None of the questionable registrations were associated with a vote in an election, although Raffensperger supports an additional citizenship verification requirement to register to vote.

Pennsylvania

In a state with more than 8.6 million registered voters, an admitted glitch in Pennsylvania’s voter registration process enabled noncitizens legally in the US to unwittingly register to vote for a time. Between 2006 and 2017, when the glitch was discovered, at least 168 unauthorized people are thought to have been registered to vote in Philadelphia, a city of more than 1.5 million people. Those figures on the glitch come from a Republican member of the city’s election commission.

Other evidence

Johnson didn’t mention Kanas, but it’s worth noting that in that state, where there are nearly 2 million registered voters, a federal court threw out a 2020 law that intended to require proof of citizenship to vote —– because the state planned to force more than 30,000 people to re-register to vote, when it was only 67 noncitizens, at most, who registered or attempted to register to vote in 19 years, according to an Associated Press report at the time.

Of the 39 noncitizens actually found on the Kansas voter rolls, the ruling said the district court found that many could be explained by “administrative anomalies.”

Finally, in terms of cases that have actually been prosecuted, the conservative Heritage Foundation — which argues there are too many vulnerabilities in the US election system — has documented a total of 25 instances of prosecution for voter fraud in which citizenship was an issue over more than 20 years.

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