Sen. Bernie Sanders claimed on the Senate floor that noncitizen voting is a myth, just months before New Jersey officials admitted about 400 noncitizens had voted in state elections.
“The good news is that noncitizens do not vote in American elections,” the Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats asserted in a March 19 floor speech.
The problem is not exclusive to New Jersey, which announced last week that a glitch caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered to vote. Numerous state audits and criminal convictions contradict what some politicians have said on noncitizen voting being nonexistent.
In the House, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., was equally adamant last year after voting against the SAVE Act, asserting, “Let me be perfectly clear: This is a non-issue. Noncitizens do not vote in U.S. elections.”
However, a 2017 Pennsylvania Department of State analysis identified 1,160 people who apparently self-reported that they were noncitizens and voluntarily canceled their voter registrations. Of those, 248 had voted at least once, casting a total of 642 ballots, according to testimony provided to the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee. Most of those votes occurred between 2000 and 2017.
More recently, a 2025 Ohio audit found 167 noncitizens had voted between 2018 and 2024, while other state audits found numbers in the double digits.
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“The truth is, are noncitizens voting in the tens of thousands? Absolutely not,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told the Daily Signal. “But it is happening.”
Over the last decade, 40 aliens were convicted of ineligible voting across multiple states, including heavily populated Florida, Texas, and California, as well as the battleground states of North Carolina and Wisconsin, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database.
Another 14, all from North Carolina, were sentenced to a diversion program in cases from 2021 and 2022. Another four, between 2016 and 2019, were also sentenced to a diversion program.
Many opponents of the SAVE America Act, which requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and a government-issued ID to vote, include the caveat that noncitizen voting is rare, especially when compared with the total number of votes cast in elections. However, many races for local offices, including seats in state legislatures, have been decided by just a handful of votes.
A Public Interest Legal Foundation database going back to 1992 shows that 1,372 state elections ended in a tie, and another 530 were decided by a single vote.
Over the last decade in Ohio, 75 elections either ended in a tie or were decided by one vote. Pennsylvania, which the foundation is suing for records, has dozens of deadlocked or one-vote elections every year. Since 2021, two elections in New Jersey resulted in a tie and another four came down to one vote, according to the database.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security released estimates showing that four states—California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and New Jersey—had 256,463 noncitizens on their voter registration lists. None of the states cooperated with the agency to identify noncitizens.
However, 25 states have worked with the Department of Homeland Security, using its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database to cross-check voter registration data. The 10 states that completed the process found about 28,000 noncitizens.
Adams noted the problem of how states implement the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the motor voter law, under which voter registration is offered with a driver’s license at a Department of Motor Vehicles office.
“This is not a conspiracy with bad intentions, this is just a broken system,” Adams said. “People mark ‘no’ on the citizenship box at the DMV and they still are offered a voter registration form. When you have a voter registration form shoved in their face, an unsophisticated noncitizen is going to think he’s eligible to vote, otherwise why would the bureaucrat offer it.”
In January, the FBI concluded that 38 noncitizens may have voted in Nevada in the 2020 election, but then the bureau closed the inquiry, CBS News reported. An FBI review of Nevada voter rolls was compared with Department of Homeland Security citizenship data and found 38 likely noncitizens.
A March 2025 audit by the Iowa secretary of state’s office found 35 noncitizens voted in the 2024 election out of 277 registered to vote. An audit by the Michigan secretary of state’s office found just 15 noncitizens voted in the battleground state in 2024.
The North Carolina Board of Elections released an audit in 2017 showing 41 noncitizens cast ballots in the 2016 election. An error, discovered in 2024 in Oregon, led to more than 1,200 registered noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, though Oregon found that just nine of them voted.
Last year, the Louisiana secretary of state’s office found 390 noncitizens registered to vote, and 79 voted, but over a span of four decades.
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