Noncitizen voting isn’t an issue in federal elections, regardless of conspiracy theories. Here’s why

Former President Donald Trump turned to one of his favorite themes on Friday — the specter of immigrants improperly voting in federal elections. House Speaker Mike Johnson came to the former president’s Florida compound to announce that he would introduce a bill to stop those who are not citizens from voting in elections.

Trump has made baseless claims about this subject before, like in 2016, when he blamed his loss of the popular vote on voting by immigrants, and then appointed a commission to investigate the issue. It disbanded without identifying a single case of a noncitizen casting a vote.

He and other Republicans have recently revved up their conspiratorial claims about the issue with the influx of migrants across the southern border under Biden, contending Democrats are letting them in to add them to the voter rolls.

The theory involves two complicated subjects, immigration and voting, but it’s actually very simple. There isn’t any indication that noncitizens vote in significant numbers in federal elections or that they will in the future. It’s already a crime for them to do so. And we know it’s not a danger because various states have examined their rolls and found very few noncitizen voters.

To be clear, there have been cases of noncitizens casting ballots, but they are extremely rare. Those who have looked into these cases say they often involve legal immigrants who mistakenly believe they have the right to vote.

Johnson tried to address this, saying that “we cannot wait for widespread fraud to occur.” But one prior crackdown on purported noncitizen voting also risked striking thousands of actual citizens from the voting rolls.

Here’s why noncitizen voting isn’t a real danger to the integrity of federal elections