Throughout his political career, former U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the nation's electoral system is "rigged" against him. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump and his allies spread rumors questioning the election's integrity even before votes were cast, with the apparent goal of persuading people that a Trump loss to Vice President Kamala Harris could not happen in a fair and just election.
In particular, Trump has claimed that if he loses, it would be because a massive number of undocumented immigrants broke federal law and voted for his political opponents. (Trump uses the term "illegal immigrants" or "illegals" to refer to this group of people.)
We boiled Trump's claims down to the following chain of events:
- The Democratic Party, under the leadership of President Joe Biden, is transporting a massive number of undocumented immigrants into the United States.
- These immigrants are then instructed (or bribed) to vote for Harris.
- The number of undocumented immigrants that will supposedly vote in the election is large enough to change the result of the election. Without these supposed "illegal" votes, Trump would win.
Trump uses the rhetoric not just to challenge the integrity of the election, but also to indirectly attack the Democratic Party's pro-immigration stance and its policies regarding the U.S.-Mexico border.
However, Trump's claims are contradicted by the following facts:
- The Democratic Party is not transporting a massive number of immigrants into the United States. Although there has been a large focus on the U.S.-Mexico border during Biden's presidency, Snopes has repeatedly disproved claims that the Democratic Party is "importing immigrants" and providing them with benefits.
- It is illegal for any noncitizen, undocumented immigrant or otherwise, to vote in U.S. federal elections. The punishments for doing so are severe and include deportation.
- There are a large number of protections in place that prevent noncitizens from voting. Because of these protections, noncitizen voting rarely happens — certainly not at the frequency required to sway the results of a presidential election.
Trump Has Made Similar Claims for 10 Years
Snopes found that Trump has publicly stated or implied that undocumented immigrants were voting in elections for at least a decade. In a tweet from October 2014, even before he announced his run for president in 2015, Trump claimed "election officials" said there were no protections preventing undocumented immigrants from voting in elections, which he said was "
During the 2016 presidential race, Trump made similar comments. For instance, he questioned the security of same-day voter registration and cited a highly criticized set of data to claim that 14% of noncitizens in the United States were registered to vote.
In 2020, Trump famously claimed there was a massive amount of voter fraud and refused to concede the election to Biden. Although his allegations of fraud during that election cycle did not focus on immigration, his efforts to sow seeds of doubt about the integrity of the U.S. electoral process took hold.
During the 2022 midterm elections, some Trump supporters who believed he won the 2020 election became poll watchers who intensely scrutinized the election process. According to reporting from Reuters, multiple states recorded incidents of poll watchers intimidating voters and election workers, which is illegal. Additionally, the Republican National Committee (RNC) established a voter integrity program to ensure that the 2022 midterm results were fair.
By December 2023, Trump was telling supporters at an Iowa rally to "guard the vote." In April 2024, Trump's campaign announced it would partner with the RNC to continue its voter integrity program in the 2024 election, with the explicit intent, in the campaign's words, to "stop Democrat attempts to circumvent rules." The allegation that undocumented immigrants are illegally registering to vote is only one idea the Trump campaign has used to justify these efforts.
The claims spread quickly, however, and were shared by prominent figures like X owner Elon Musk. In September 2024, Reuters reported that Trump's legal team had already filed lawsuits that could be used to challenge the election on the grounds of noncitizen voting in four of the seven swing states expected to decide the election.
The Truth
The fact of the matter is simply that noncitizens rarely vote in U.S. elections, something the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, reported on in 2020.
A 2015 analysis of the survey Trump later used to claim that 14% of noncitizens in the United States were registered to vote found that the result was simply due to human error — that is, all the "noncitizens" who marked themselves as registered to vote were almost certainly U.S. citizens who accidentally recorded themselves as noncitizens when taking the survey.
In 2016 and 2017, the Brennan Institute for Justice, a liberal nonprofit organization, investigated 42 jurisdictions across 12 states to find out whether there was any truth to the claims of voter fraud. Of the 10 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population of noncitizens, the survey looked at eight of them.
According to the institute's report, voters cast 23.5 million votes in these jurisdictions in the election. The institute counted 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting that required further investigation. That's an occurrence rate of 0.0001% — less than the odds of being struck by lightning in your life.
Under federal law, states are required to maintain and audit voter rolls regularly to ensure an election's integrity. As an example, the state of Georgia, expected to play a critical role in the 2024 election, audited its voter rolls in 2022. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, announced that the state found 1,634 cases in which a noncitizen attempted to register to vote between 1997 to 2022, about 65 per year. But according to the report, none of the individuals in those cases ever officially voted, thanks to the existing protections that safeguard the voter registration process.
Registration Protections
In order to illustrate the numerous protections in place to prevent noncitizens from voting in U.S. federal elections, let's go through the steps an immigrant residing in the country illegally would have to take in order to cast just one ballot and have it counted.
First, this person would have to enter the United States without paperwork and apply for political asylum. During this process, the individual's name and other identifying information would be added to a federal database that marked them as a noncitizen.
Second, this person would need to apply to register to vote (except in North Dakota, which verifies voter eligibility using a strict voter ID law). All 49 states with voter registration require the voter to attest under penalty of law that they are a U.S. citizen, that they are over the age of 18 and that they are a resident of the state they wish to vote in.
These registration forms require applicants to provide a large amount of personal information. This is a problem for immigrants living in the country illegally, who may be afraid the government could use that identifying information to arrest or deport them. In this case, those fears are valid: Any noncitizen found guilty of such a crime would face prison time or deportation.
During the voter registration process, the immigrant would have to prove they are a resident of the state they live in, most commonly using a driver's license or Social Security number. In order to apply for that documentation, the immigrant would have to provide more identifying information to the government alongside immigration paperwork that confirms their status as a noncitizen. At this point in the process, there would now be multiple governmental databases that list this person as a noncitizen.
Then, each voter registration application is reviewed and cross-checked against driver's license and federal immigration databases from the Department of Homeland Security to scan for any discrepancies. If election officials have any suspicions, they can flag the application for further review. That process requires even more personal information from the voter. If there are still questions, election officials can always deny the application.
There are a few jurisdictions in the United States, including San Francisco and Washington, D.C., where noncitizens are allowed to vote, but only in some local elections, not federal elections. In San Francisco, for instance, noncitizens are allowed to vote in school board elections only. However, noncitizens in these jurisdictions must register to vote using a specific form in a specific way. This means that such noncitizens are added to the voter rolls with the explicit knowledge that they are noncitizen voters, and their ballots can be tracked as such.
All of these are incredibly effective — again, Georgia's 2022 audit found that out of the 1,634 cases in which a noncitizen was suspected of attempting to register to vote, not one vote was ever cast. As Gerry Cohen, a member of the Board of Elections in Wake County, North Carolina, told Snopes: "There's a big difference between registering to vote and actually voting."
Protections at the Polling Place
Taylor Kinnerup, communications director for the Maricopa County recorder's office in Arizona, added an additional distinction: "There's also a big difference between casting a vote and that vote being counted."
In October 2024, posts on X surfaced alleging that the Texas secretary of state had instructed poll workers to allow voters who presented an ID indicating they were a noncitizen to vote as usual. The claim quickly morphed into the general idea that Texas was allowing noncitizens to vote. This is untrue, because of the protections in place after a ballot is cast.
In a directive "to all election officials," Texas Director of Elections Christina Adkins told poll workers to acknowledge the noncitizen ID when checking for a valid voter registration, but pointed out that these voters might just be new U.S. citizens who had not yet updated their driver's licenses to reflect their citizenship status. Denying such eligible voters the right to cast a ballot would be a clear example of illegal voter suppression. The directive recommended that these voters present a different form of photo ID if possible to avoid the issue. Regardless, the work done to ensure that those voters are eligible is performed before the ballot is counted.
After arriving at a polling place, voters are required to provide their name (and depending on the jurisdiction, their ID). These names are then checked against registration records (again, except in North Dakota). If there's a match, a ballot is printed for the voter. The voter then signs, affirming under penalty of law that they understand the penalties of casting a fraudulent ballot.
The voter's signature is a part of the verification process. Kinnerup said that Maricopa County poll workers compare the signature to the voter's other recorded signatures before the ballot is opened and counted. Just like with voter registration, an election official can flag the ballot for further inspection if they have any doubts about the validity of the voter's signature.
Under Section 302 of the Help America Vote Act, signed into law by then-President George W. Bush in 2002, voters who are not on a voter roll but attest that they are an eligible voter can still cast a provisional ballot in a federal election, something that might initially seem concerning. But even in this case, there are still protections. A provisional ballot is counted only if the voter's identity, citizenship and residency can be confirmed in the days following the election. Kinnerup explained the process using an example she said Arizona regularly deals with.
"California is a deep blue state, and some Republicans in Southern California might have the idea to cast a ballot in Arizona because it's a more competitive election," she said. "So there are Republicans in Southern California who drive across the border to Yuma County, Arizona, walk into a polling place and ask for a ballot."
By law, election workers are required to provide them with one. However, in order for these ballots to count, these voters would need to provide identification to confirm their citizenship and residency. Their California driver's licenses would be a red flag for poll workers, indicating that these voters were not Arizona residents, and the ballots would not be counted after investigating the voters' credentials.
The SAVE Act
Some Republicans have claimed these precautions are still not enough. In April 2024, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson met with Trump to discuss concerns of voter fraud and noncitizen voting. The bill resulting from that conversation, the SAVE Act, would have mandated that those wishing to register to vote show documented proof of U.S. citizenship. This means that in order to register to vote, voters would have to submit their birth certificate — a document that 9% of Americans
In September 2024, facing the threat of a government shutdown, Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, calling for Republicans to reject any stopgap spending bill that did not include "absolute assurances on election security," because Democrats were supposedly attempting to "stuff" voter registrations with undocumented immigrants. The SAVE Act was briefly resurrected at that point, but Democrats objected to its inclusion in the spending bill. Eventually, Johnson partnered with Democrats to pass a bill that did not include the SAVE Act in order to avoid a government shutdown.
It is unclear whether Republicans will continue to pursue further legislation at the federal level to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. At the state level, according to the Brennan Center and the Voting Rights Lab, Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire and North Dakota have passed laws since the 2020 election that aimed to address nonexistent noncitizen voting using documented proof of citizenship.
A Brief Note on the Democratic Party's Immigration Platform
Part of what made Trump's claim of noncitizen voting stick is that it combined two of his favorite targets: election integrity and the U.S.-Mexico border. Much of this story has focused on disproving Trump's claims about election integrity. However, it is also important to examine what exactly Trump and his allies claim when criticizing or attacking Kamala Harris in that regard.
The following post on X is a good example:
The post claims that during a town hall with Latino voters, Harris said she wanted to allow "illegal immigrants to become citizens who will then be able to vote."
This is an explanation of the Democratic Party's immigration platform and a statement about the privileges of United States citizenship, not an admission that Harris is going to rig the election. Harris is stating a fact: that undocumented immigrants in the United States currently do not have a path to citizenship. Although it is true that giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship would eventually allow them, as naturalized citizens, to vote in U.S. federal elections, going through that process would likely take a long time. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, lawful permanent residents are required to live in the United States for five years before they are eligible to apply for naturalized citizenship.
Snopes found no evidence that a significant number of noncitizens are attempting to register to vote in the 2024 election. After explaining the large number of precautions in place to stop noncitizens from voting, both the election officials we spoke to said it is highly unlikely
Cohen, the Wake County Board of Elections member, said he felt baffled by the scale of the claims. "The thought that a large body of people are doing this is stupid," he said. "It's hard enough to get people to vote as is."
Kinnerup, from the Maricopa County recorder's office, said she thought people were believing Trump's claims because of a recent change in Arizonan politics. The demographics of Arizona have changed dramatically in recent years, and the media's struggle to predict the winner of Arizona in the last election probably made some voters feel like something had gone wrong.
But she also wanted to remind voters that the poll workers were not the enemy. "Everyone, Democrat and Republican, wants the election to be fair," she said. "There's no such thing as a perfect election. But 2020 taught us a lot — to prepare for the unexpected."