Can illegal immigrants really vote in US elections?

Donald Trump and his Republican allies have repeatedly claimed that Democrats plan to trick illegal immigrants into voting in US elections.

“Our elections are bad and many illegal immigrants coming into the country are trying to get them to vote,” Trump said during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

BBC Verify identified more than 100 paid ads on Facebook and Instagram posted by Republicans since early September focusing on the issue.

It is illegal for a non-US citizen to vote in national elections, but research suggests that cases in which this actually occurs are very rare.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 prohibits non-citizens – including illegal immigrants – from voting in federal elections.

The penalty includes a year in prison, a fine and possibly deportation.

Every country is obliged to use joint registration a form that requires people to confirm that they are U.S. citizens, under penalty of perjury for false claims, but does not require documentary evidence.

“That first step of having to check a box saying you are a citizen to register to vote is a huge deterrent to illegal immigrants because lying is extremely risky,” says Jasleen Singh, a voting expert at Brennan's Liberal Policy Advisory Center Justice Center.

In many states, voter rolls are linked to Citizenship and Immigration Services, death certificates, and postal records to ensure that noncitizens who are deceased or live out of state are not registered to vote.

“The polling stations have a list of eligible voters, and if a person who is not a citizen of the country shows up, he or she will be rejected or asked to cast a provisional ballot, which will only be accepted if he or she presents proof of citizenship,” says Prof. Ronald Hayduk, a voting rights expert at San Francisco State University.

Noncitizens cannot vote in statewide elections.

However, some municipalities in California, Maryland, Vermont and Washington allow them to vote in some local elections, such as for school boards.

A number of studies, conducted by both conservative and leftist organizations, suggest that cases of illegal immigrants voting in US federal elections are very rare.

One interview by the Brennan Center for Justice interviewed 44 election officials who worked in 12 states during the 2016 election.

It turned out that of the 23.5 million votes counted in these states, an estimated 30 suspected cases of non-citizen voting were referred for further investigation.

That's about 0.0001% of all votes cast.

Analysis A a database collecting cases of electoral fraud Between 1999 and 2023, the conservative research group Heritage Foundation discovered 77 cases of non-citizens voting.

A number of other reports, including from the conservative think tank Cato Institute, titled “Foreigners do not vote illegally in detectable numbers', I come to similar conclusions.

“According to many sources, the number of non-citizens voting in the election is very small,” says Walter Olson, a senior research fellow at the Cato Institute who has authored numerous reports on voter fraud.

“It's not zero, some people slip through the cracks for various reasons, but it's not a level that could affect the outcome of the election.”

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, a Republican proposal that would have required people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote, was defeated in the House of Representatives.

Republican lawmakers continue to call for more citizenship requirements.

“We have a number of states that have audited their voter rolls and found thousands of foreigners,” the chamber's top Republican, Mike Johnson, told CNN.

He highlighted Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia – three states where polls show a tight race between Trump and Kamala Harris.

w Ohio, a review requested by Republican state officialsshowed that of the roughly eight million registered voters, 597 cases were referred for “further consideration and potential prosecution” for noncitizens who registered to vote.

In Pennsylvania, a glitch with electronic touch screens at state driver license centers incorrectly showed non-citizens the option to register to vote when obtaining a new or updated driver's license.

This bug was present in the system from 2006 to 2017 and has since been fixed.

W 2017 r. Pennsylvania election officials said Non-citizen immigrants may have illegally cast 544 ballots out of more than 93 million ballots in elections held since 2000.

in Georgia, review of voter rolls in 2022 found that 1,634 people “attempted to register to vote” but “failed to be verified” out of approximately seven million registered voters.

“Voter fraud and voting by illegal immigrants are so rare that this myth is designed to sow doubt about the integrity of the elections and to cast doubt on the outcome of the election,” Ms. Singh argues.

BBC Verify has identified 118 paid ads posted on Facebook and Instagram since September 1 by Republican Party candidates or by Republican political groups that call for universal non-citizen voter registration or that raise the issue of whether non-citizens should have the right to vote in elections.

The ads we identified were displayed between 7.8 and 9 million times across platforms.

One, which has had more than 2.4 million views, invites users to take a survey titled: “Should illegal immigrants be allowed to vote?”

Another ad posted by Congresswoman Ann Wagner, with over 900,000 views, asks users to answer the same question.

Additional reporting by Maryam Ahmed.