Top Republicans are laying the groundwork to claim the 2024 election isn’t secure and fair because of noncitizen voting, a theory that has lived in conservative circles since President Biden’s 2020 victory.
Former President Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have claimed that Democrats are encouraging migrants to come into the United States so they can vote in elections and support their ticket.
“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country,” Trump said in September.
Recently arrived migrants cannot vote in U.S. elections, however, and immigrants must embark on the multiyear process to gain citizenship before they are able to cast a ballot.
Despite claims that migrants are voting in droves, there’s little evidence that those ineligible to vote are seeking to cast ballots.
Newly arrived migrants are not able to vote
Newly arrived migrants who enter at the southern border — those seemingly cited by GOP leaders — aren’t allowed to vote in the U.S., nor are they likely on a pathway to ever do so.
Nonetheless, a number of figures have suggested, without evidence, they will be likely Democratic voters despite their inability to cast a ballot.
“The Biden/Harris administration has been flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona. It is a surefire way to win every election,” Elon Musk, himself an immigrant, wrote on the social platform X, which he owns.
However, those permitted to enter the country to seek asylum face a years-long backlog to make their case and only if successful can begin the multiyear process toward gaining citizenship — not the swift process Musk claimed.
And many migrants who have entered in recent years have done so legally, through a program that allows citizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to come to the U.S. for two years if they can secure a sponsor. The status, however, is only temporary, limiting the ability for them to get on a track to seek citizenship.
Few, if any, beneficiaries of the Biden administration’s humanitarian programs will be eligible to vote in November.
But a minuscule number of immigrants who arrived in the United States for the first time during the Biden administration could be eligible to vote in 2024, as new U.S. citizens. An immigrant who arrived in the United States in 2021 already as a permanent resident — for example, petitioned by their U.S. citizen spouse — may have naturalized in time to vote in November’s election.
Lack of evidence that noncitizens vote in elections
The assertion that migrants are voting clashes with data that have found limited such cases.
A study of the 2016 election by the Brennan Center for Justice reviewing data for jurisdictions where some 23.5 million ballots were cast found just 30 cases of suspected noncitizen voting — or 0.0001 percent of the total votes cast.
A Washington Post review of conservative Heritage Foundation election fraud tracking found 85 cases in which noncitizens attempted to vote between 2002 and 2023 — a period during which 2 billion votes have been cast in federal elections.
The libertarian Cato Institute has also called the claims one of the “most frequent and less serious criticisms” relating to migration.
Nonetheless, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said it’s a matter of intuition.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number,” he said when pushing a bill that would ban the already illegal practice of noncitizen voting.
Noncitizens also face steep penalties for illegally casting a ballot. The federal voter registration form requires applicants to affirm under penalty of perjury that they are citizens. Any noncitizen found to have cast a ballot risks jail time and even deportation. Doing so would also jeopardize their ability to one day become citizens.
Gaining citizenship — and the right to vote — takes years
Though the federal government is processing naturalizations at the fastest rate in at least a decade, the statutory waiting periods to become eligible for citizenship are set in stone.
The fastest path to eligibility is through marriage to a U.S. citizen: A foreign national must spend three years in the United States as a permanent resident while married to a citizen.
Spouses of State Department employees who receive overseas assignments can request to waive that three-year period.
Foreign nationals not married to a U.S. citizen have to wait five years as permanent residents to apply for naturalization.
But often the longest delay comes in waiting for permanent residency. Asylum-seekers, for instance, must get their final grant of asylum to apply for permanent residency — the average time to get an asylum hearing in 2024 is 1,424 days, or about 3 years and 11 months.
Then, those granted asylum have to wait a year in the United States to be eligible to apply for an adjustment of status to permanent residency, assuming they are eligible under any of the existing categories.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) says 80 percent of those change of status applications are completed within 17 months, and the median processing time in fiscal 2024 has been 13.4 months, down from 22.9 months in fiscal 2023.
And most migrants who have arrived over the past four years are unlikely to get asylum.
Many have been channeled to so-called liminal statuses such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which don’t allow beneficiaries to apply for permanent residency, thus granting no direct path to citizenship.
Cuban nationals do have a relative fast-track to naturalization.
Under the Cuban Adjustment Act, eligible Cuban nationals can apply for permanent residency after a year of presence in the United States, and the average processing time for permanent residency in 2024 for Cuban nationals is just 4.6 months, up from 3.3 months in fiscal 2023 and 5.5 months in fiscal 2022.
In theory, a Cuban national arriving on parole on Jan. 20, 2021 — even before the humanitarian parole programs were in place — could have received permanent residency as early as June of 2022, and, if married to a U.S. citizen, would be eligible to naturalize in time to vote in the 2026 midterms.
Trump focused on noncitizen voting going into Election Day
The former president has brought up what he claims are issues with noncitizens trying to vote multiple times, to try to get the topic top of mind among voters.
Trump was asked by Bloomberg News earlier this week if Google should be broken up, and he pivoted to talking about the recent Justice Department lawsuit against the state of Virginia for purging voter rolls.
“I just haven’t gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad voters, and the Justice Department sued them that they should be allowed to put those bad votes and illegal votes back in and let the people vote,” he said.
Trump was referring to the Department of Justice (DOJ) claims that Virginia state officials violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by challenging voters’ eligibility too close to Election Day. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed an executive order in August confirming there were “daily” updates to the voter list, including to compare “the list of individuals who have been identified as non-citizens” by the State Department of Motor Vehicles “to the list of existing registered voters.”
Local registrars were then required to contact challenged voters to inform them they were “pending cancellation” unless they “affirm their citizenship” within 14 days, which is a process that DOJ said led to some Virginians’ voter registration being canceled.
Similarly, when Trump was pressed on whether he lost the 2020 election during the Sept. 10 debate against Vice President Harris, he reverted to suggesting that elections would be “good” if we “have borders.”
Vance has also suggested that elections are not secure because of immigrants voting. He has blamed Democrats in Congress for blocking legislation that would have banned noncitizens from voting for perpetuating the issue.
The Democratic-controlled Senate refused to take up House-passed legislation in July that sought to expand proof-of-citizenship requirements to vote in federal elections and impose voter roll purge requirements on states. While the legislation was touted by Trump at the time, it would have banned the already illegal practice of noncitizen voting.