The hunt for noncitizen voters in Georgia yields few results
President Donald Trump and his allies have stoked fears about noncitizen voters ahead of the midterms and bolstered efforts to find such voters to prosecute.
The president has cited a preliminary U.S. Census Bureau report with unverified claims of thousands of noncitizens casting ballots as evidence he won the 2020 election. The administration has pressured states to run their voter rolls through an error-prone database to find noncitizen voters and even threatened to prosecute election officials for knowingly allowing noncitizens to cast ballots.
State officials released results from a citizenship review on Tuesday that found about 430 voters who cast ballots at some point over the past 30 years may not be citizens. Georgia currently has nearly 8.2 million registered voters.
“Election integrity isn’t a slogan. It is the daily work of checking the voter rolls, verifying eligibility, sharing information with our counties and continually improving our systems,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement.
Noncitizen voting is against state and federal law. If a noncitizen wanted to vote in Georgia, there would be many legal hurdles they would need to clear, as state law already requires voters to show evidence of citizenship before registering to vote.
And all voters must show ID before voting in person or when requesting an absentee ballot.
Noncitizens knowingly casting ballots carry steep penalties. Under Georgia law, knowingly voting or registering to vote as a noncitizen is a felony punishable with up to 10 years in prison and fines of up to $100,000.
Census Bureau report
Trump has revived his 2020 election fraud claims, alleging that noncitizens cast thousands of illegal votes across the nation. About 400 of those in the Census report are from Georgia.
The Census Bureau’s preliminary analysis of 128 million voters found with “high confidence” that 24,000 noncitizens illegally cast ballots. Another 32 million remain to be analyzed, according to the report.
Election experts have questioned the analysis’ methodology, saying it could have generated false positives. Gabriel Sterling of Georgia’s secretary of state’s office raised whether they factored in derived citizens, who are children granted citizenship through the naturalization of their parents or other select circumstances and may not have certificates proving their citizenship status.
Sterling said the office has requested to see the Census Bureau’s data.
“I just don’t think there were that many in Georgia, quite frankly,” he said.
Even if the figures held up under further scrutiny and all of those ballots were cast for Democrat Joe Biden, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of Trump’s loss across the country, nor in Georgia. Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes.
When state officials ran voter data through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to verify citizenship status, 2,500 people were identified as potential noncitizens.
State officials found most of those voters were already placed in a pending status after applying to register to vote, meaning election officials needed more information to verify the citizenship of those voters.
Such voters can still show up to the polls and cast a ballot as long as they provide ID and proof of citizenship.
State audits and investigations
The secretary of state’s office has conducted its own reviews of the state’s voter rolls, finding scattered instances of possible noncitizens casting ballots but not enough to swing an election.
The latest review showed about 430 potential noncitizens who have voted at some point within the last three decades. It included information from the DHS’s SAVE database and an audit by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts.
In 2024, state election officials found 20 voter registrations out of more than 8 million to be noncitizens, but only nine had previously voted.
From time to time, state investigations have found isolated instances of noncitizen voters. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of noncitizen voter allegations adjudicated by the State Election Board over the last year found about 20 cases. Some were dismissed. Others were referred to seek penalties through the attorney general’s office or sent letters of reprimand.
Some claims simply boil down to a voter not providing ID when applying for their registration. In one instance, state investigators found that a Macon man flagged as a potential noncitizen who had voted in several elections was indeed a citizen.
The man became a naturalized citizen in September of 2020, according to a certificate. Records show the man had voted six times since 2020 and was sent a notice by county election officials to verify his citizenship after applying to register online.
The man’s wife told investigators that he sent his naturalization certificate to county officials in October 2020.
The State Election Board dismissed the case in December.
But the Trump administration is poised to continue its pursuit of noncitizens. According to an internal memo reported by CNN, Homeland Security Investigations is planning a surge in efforts to probe for voter fraud in nine states, including Georgia, from September to mid-October.
“HSI is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” said a DHS spokesperson in a statement.