Up until now, disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on the need for safeguards against noncitizen voting was based on wildly disparate understandings of the basic facts. Not all Republicans have publicly bought into the president’s unsubstantiated claims that millions upon millions of noncitizens regularly vote as part of some kind of Democratic “open borders” conspiracy. Indeed, many Republicans essentially ignored Donald Trump’s claims about a Chinese-led election-theft cabal, which he aired to general embarrassment in an address to the nation last week. The same goes for Trump’s hastily contrived “evidence” of noncitizen voting, which was released by the Department of Homeland Security just in time for his latest trip down the voter-fraud rabbit hole.

For their part, Democrats have consistently and accurately argued that there has never been solid evidence of any significant noncitizen voting in recent U.S. elections, as Brennan Center for Justice president Michael Waldman noted in 2024:

In 2017, my colleagues Myrna Pérez (now a federal appeals court judge) and Douglas Keith conducted an exhaustive study of 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election. They found that “election officials in those places, who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes, referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, even suspected — not proven — noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast.” Don’t take our word for it. The libertarian Cato Institute, funded by the Koch brothers, confirms: “Noncitizens Don’t Illegally Vote in Detectable Numbers.” That makes sense. As my colleague Sean Morales-Doyle asks, “Would you risk everything — your freedom, your life in the United States, your ability to be near your family — just to cast a single ballot?” 

In 2017, my colleagues Myrna Pérez (now a federal appeals court judge) and Douglas Keith conducted an exhaustive study of 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election. They found that “election officials in those places, who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes, referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for........

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