The question
No.
In the Heritage Foundation's own election fraud database, undocumented immigrants voting accounts for sixteen cases since 2000.
Sixteen. Not sixteen thousand. Heritage built that database specifically to show that election fraud is a serious problem, and it is the most cited source on the pro-enforcement side. Nearly all sixteen involved someone using a stolen or forged identity that said they were a citizen, which means voter ID and citizenship checks would not have caught them either.
Georgia, 2024
Each dot is one thousand registered voters.
Georgia checked all 8.2 million people on its voter roll and found 20 noncitizens registered. That is the faint red dot, and even it is fifty times too big. To draw those 20 people at true scale we would need one fiftieth of a single dot.
Who actually does it
This is the part that gets skipped. The claim is about people here illegally. The cases are mostly about people here legally who misunderstood the rules, plus government clerks who registered people that had already said they were not citizens.
Almost every one of those sixteen people had adopted a false identity as a US citizen, with documents to match. At the moment they voted, the government had no reason to think they were anything else. Proof of citizenship requirements would not have stopped them.
American Immigration Council analysis of the Heritage Foundation database, August 2026
Reuters reviewed every federal case brought under the 1996 law. Over thirty years, 129 people have been criminally charged with voting as a noncitizen and 73 were convicted. Nearly four in five were green card holders. When Michigan charged five people in August 2026, three had green cards and the other two had lawful temporary status. None were undocumented.
Reuters investigation, July 2026
Heritage's database holds 1,619 election offenses of every kind. Noncitizen voting is 89 of them, about five percent. Across the seven presidential elections since 2000, between 105 and 158 million people voted each time. Even if all 89 had voted in a single election, it would be under one ten thousandth of one percent.
American Immigration Council, August 2026
What the state audits found
Two of these were run by Republican officials who ordered the audits precisely because they were being told there was a problem.
Brad Raffensperger audited the full roll in October 2024, calling it the most comprehensive citizenship check the state had ever done. Twenty noncitizens were registered, about one in every 400,000. Nine had ever voted, and most of those did so before Georgia tightened verification in 2012. None voted in the 2024 general election. Raffensperger's conclusion: "Georgia is a model when it comes to preventing noncitizen voting."
Georgia Secretary of State, October 2024
The state compared citizenship data in 7.9 million active driving records against 7.2 million registered voters. Sixteen people appeared to be noncitizens who cast a ballot in the November 2024 general election. All were referred for prosecution.
Michigan Department of State audit, April 2025
Deidre Henderson reviewed every active and inactive record from April 2025 to May 2026. It is the most thorough check any state has done. Her summary was that there is not a widespread problem.
Utah Lieutenant Governor, May 2026
Pushback
These are the strongest arguments on the other side. They deserve real answers rather than a wave of the hand.
True, and this is the best version of the argument. The thing to notice is that the referrals are mostly about registration, not voting. In the August 2024 batch, Frank LaRose identified 597 apparent noncitizens on the rolls. Of those, 138 appeared to have cast a ballot at some point and 459 had registered without ever voting, out of more than eight million registered Ohioans.
LaRose has also explained how it happens. Noncitizens can get an Ohio driver's license, and at the counter they are offered voter registration they are not eligible for. Sometimes they misunderstand, and sometimes a clerk registers them by mistake. He has said people have come to his office on their own to report the error.
Also true, and it is a genuine failure. A software error at the Motor Vehicle Commission registered those people even though they had checked a box saying they were not citizens. The state admitted it.
Fewer than 400 of them ever voted, and some of those had naturalized by the time they did. Even assuming every one was still a noncitizen, it works out to 0.009% of the ballots cast in 2024.
Correct, and it belongs in the honest version of this. Those are mostly what Henderson calls legacy voters, people who registered before Utah required a driver's license or Social Security number. There is no evidence they are noncitizens. It means the record is old, not that the person is ineligible.
Utah also flagged 25 more as probable noncitizens and gave them 30 days to prove citizenship. That is the system working, and it is worth saying out loud rather than rounding down to 27.
That is a fair objection, and it is the reason the newer audits matter more than the old prosecution counts. Stephen Richer, the Republican who ran elections in Maricopa County, makes exactly this point himself.
So states stopped counting prosecutions and started matching voter rolls directly against citizenship records. Utah, Georgia, Michigan, Idaho, Montana, Louisiana. The answers keep coming back small.
Georgia's was run by Brad Raffensperger. Utah's by Deidre Henderson. Ohio's by Frank LaRose. All Republicans, and all of them ordered these audits because they were under pressure to find something. Heritage and Cato are conservative institutions. Their numbers point the same way.
The other side of the ledger
In June 2026 a federal court ruled that the changes making SAVE available for voter list maintenance were unlawful, and that its data cannot be used in its current form. That decision is under appeal.
So the searching is not free. Each of these programs caught a small number of real errors and a much larger number of eligible Americans.
To recap
More than a billion ballots have been cast in this country since 2000.
In the fraud database built by the people making the accusation, undocumented immigrants voting comes to sixteen cases, nearly all committed by someone carrying forged papers that said they were a citizen.
That is the whole thing. That is what we are being told to be afraid of.
Sources