Conspiracy theories—not fact—fuel the push for documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) requirements to register to vote.
The public rationale for these policies is the empirically false premise that noncitizen voting is widespread in the United States. But as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services itself acknowledged in an October 2024 letter, “[f]ederal law prohibits non-U.S. citizens from registering and voting in Federal elections,” and the “evidence is clear that these laws are working as intended—it is extremely uncommon for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections.”
DPOC laws like the SAVE Act and its clones—and the conspiracy theories on which they are based—are part of a widespread effort by bad-faith actors to prevent eligible American citizens from voting, especially among targeted groups.
Extensive data shows that verified cases of noncitizen voting are vanishingly rare and statistically insignificant, with zero impact on any election outcomes. The data resources listed below collect key information on the actual instances of alleged non-citizen voting.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s nationwide database of alleged instances of voter fraud identifies only 99 total cases of suspected noncitizen voting going back to the year 2000.
A recent study by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research reviewed suspected cases of noncitizen voting in all 50 states, and found that the “vast majority of allegations of noncitizen registration or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data.”
The free-market libertarian Cato Institute published in February a compilation of recent data from investigations conducted by several states on either side of the political spectrum. They found that noncitizen voting is “virtually nonexistent”, and concluded that false claims of fraudulent voters are “an affront to our democracy and to all those who work to deliver free and fair elections.”
A 2016 study by the nonpartisan Brennan Center of 42 jurisdictions across the country, including eight of the ten with the largest populations of noncitizens nationally, identified just 30 instances of suspected noncitizen voting, accounting for just .0001% of votes cast in these jurisdictions in 2016.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s nationwide database of alleged instances of voter fraud identifies only 99 total cases of suspected noncitizen voting going back to the year 2000.
A recent study by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research reviewed suspected cases of noncitizen voting in all 50 states, and found that the “vast majority of allegations of noncitizen registration or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data.”
The free-market libertarian Cato Institute published in February a compilation of recent data from investigations conducted by several states on either side of the political spectrum. They found that noncitizen voting is “virtually nonexistent”, and concluded that false claims of fraudulent voters are “an affront to our democracy and to all those who work to deliver free and fair elections.”
A 2016 study by the nonpartisan Brennan Center of 42 jurisdictions across the country, including eight of the ten with the largest populations of noncitizens nationally, identified just 30 instances of suspected noncitizen voting, accounting for just .0001% of votes cast in these jurisdictions in 2016.
Recent reviews of millions of state-level voter registration records by election officials have clearly demonstrated that the number of noncitizens illegally registered to vote remains exceedingly small. Notably, given the inaccuracies observed in the results of data matching due in part to stale data, even these miniscule numbers are likely overstatements.
In 2014, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission issued a 46-page Memorandum rejecting requests by Arizona, Georgia, and Kansas to add a DPOC requirement to the federal voter registration form, citing the exceedingly small number of noncitizens who had illegally registered to vote, which it found were attributable to a level of human error that is nearly unavoidable in such a bureaucratic process.
A 2024 review of Georgia voter rolls by state election officials identified only 20 noncitizens of the 8.2 million people—just .0002%—that were registered to vote in the state.
In October 2024, the Idaho Secretary of State identified 36 potential noncitizens out of over one million registered voters. The Secretary of State noted: “Out of the million plus registered voters we started with, we’re down to 10 thousandths of a percent in terms of this number. … This is very rare, it’s very limited.”
In September 2025 Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry conducted a review of the last 40 years of state voting records, ultimately identifying just 390 suspected noncitizen registrants across the four-decade period evaluated. Even these suspected noncitizen voters—meaning not even voters who were found to have registered and cast a ballot illegally—accounted for just .01% of the nearly 2.9 million registered voters in Louisiana. Noncitizens illegally registering or voting is not a systemic problem in Louisiana,” Secretary Landry said.
In October 2025, the Arkansas Secretary of State identified 240 potential noncitizens, 0.013% of the state’s 1.8 million registered voters. Only thirty to forty of those 240 were believed to have ever voted in an election.
In November 2025, the Tennessee Secretary of State identified only 42 potential noncitizens–approximately 0.0001% of the state’s 4.3 million registered voters.
In January 2026, the Montana Secretary of State identified 23 potential noncitizens, representing 0.003% of the 762,959 people registered to vote in Montana in 2022.
In Texas, the Secretary of State announced they had identified 2,724 potential noncitizens out of the state’s more than 18 million registered voters. Subsequent reporting has revealed that the state failed to check whether those 2,724 voters had already provided proof of citizenship to the state. A ProPublica analysis revealed that more than five percent of these potential noncitizens were actually citizens.
An investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune tallied the publicly available results from the past year: overall, “seven states with a total of about 35 million registered voters have publicly reported the results of running their voter rolls through the system. Those searches have identified roughly 4,200 people — about 0.01% of registered voters — as noncitizens.”
In June 2018, a federal trial court struck down a Kansas DPOC law, finding that the provision that blocked 35,000 eligible Kansans from registering to vote over a three-year period violated the NVRA and the U.S. Constitution. The court was “unable to find empirical evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens successfully registered to vote” under the state’s previous attestation requirement. Though it found a small number of noncitizens had registered, those instances were “largely explained by administrative error, confusion, or mistake.” Notably, the court declined to “rely on extrapolated numbers from tiny sample sizes and otherwise flawed data. This ruling was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in 2020, and the Supreme Court declined to review it later that year.
In Arizona, the Ninth Circuit noted that a post 2020 election “audit” there “did not reveal any evidence of voter fraud, yet the Legislature proceeded to enact legislation [expanding the state’s DPOC requirements] aimed at remedying the voter fraud issue that was contradicted by its own findings.”
Information asserting that noncitizen voting is a larger problem than is demonstrated by the findings listed above has been either widely discredited or shown to be a misrepresentation of the data:
Anti-voter groups have pointed to a Pew Research study that found “24 million nationwide voter registrations were inaccurate,” claiming that this proves the existence of a “long-running, alien voter fraud crisis.” Importantly, this Pew Research study concluded that most of 24 million inaccuracies were due to entirely benign, explainable discrepancies such as voters dying or moving jurisdictions without updating or cancelling previous registrations. The study made no mention of how many inaccuracies, if any, were due to citizenship issues.
Another claim is that the existence of Arizona’s 50,000 federal-only voters—meaning voters who could not satisfy the state’s DPOC requirement—proves that there are a significant number of noncitizen voters in the state. This leaves out the probability that those voters are among the nearly 21.3 million otherwise-eligible people nationwide who cannot readily access DPOC.
Anti-voter groups also cite a debunked blog that claims “10-27% of noncitizens in the U.S. are now registered to vote.” Importantly, this blog analyzes data from a very large sample of 2022 census data with incredibly small sub-samples of noncitizen respondents to draw this conclusion, a methodology similar to a previous study on the issue that was denounced and discredited by over 200 professional political scientists. This cohort of scientists agreed that the dynamics of a large overall sample of survey respondents and very small sub-sample of self-reported noncitizens means that “response error explains nearly all of the supposed noncitizens in [the] sample who vote.”
Increasing access to pre-Election Day voting opportunities like by-mail voting is a top priority of the Fair Elections Center’s Voting Rights Project. Read more about our policy priorities here.
OH SB 153/HB 233 would require documentary proof of citizenship, along with other sweeping changes to election code like banning the use of drop boxes and requiring multiple forms of identification to match your voter registration. The bill would also drastically change the process for citizen-led ballot initiatives.
Last updated: March 3, 2026