Media Lies About ‘Rare’ Noncitizen Voting Are Bull Hockey

The legacy press has an entire vocabulary for election fraud, and every word in it carries the same instruction: Stop looking. “U.S. News and World Report and PBS: “extremely rare.” Time magazine: “very, very rare.” NPR quoted an expert who called it “infinitesimally rare.” It has become a reflex, appended to any mention of election integrity, the way a surgeon general’s warning is appended to a pack of cigarettes, that election fraud is rare, rare, rare. The implication is that “rare” means “irrelevant.” But does it?

Since When Is Rarity the Standard?

Every ballot cast by an ineligible voter cancels out the ballot of an eligible one. A noncitizen who votes does not merely add a vote to one side of the ledger — he subtracts one from a citizen who did everything right. Every fraudulent vote cast invalidates the vote of an eligible voter, effectively disenfranchising that person.

So how many disenfranchised citizens is the acceptable number? One hundred? A thousand? We do not apply this reasoning anywhere else in election law. Nobody argues that ballot-box stuffing is tolerable at low volume, or that a poll worker who alters a few dozen returns should be waved off because the total is statistically small. We do not tell a mugging victim that street crime is rare.

More to the point: Rarity is irrelevant to the margin. Recent congressional races have been decided by a few hundred votes. Virginia’s House of Delegates control came down to a tied district settled by drawing a name from a bowl. In races like these, “infinitesimally rare” fraud is more than sufficient to determine who governs.

Is the Problem Even Being Measured?

The Heritage Foundation maintains an Election Fraud Database documenting proven instances of election fraud — cases in which a prosecutor thought the conduct serious enough to act on, and which ended in a conviction, a civil penalty, a judicial finding, or an overturned election. As of this writing, the database contains 1,619 such cases.

The database does not include potential fraud that election officials discover but that is never investigated or prosecuted — and it obviously cannot include fraud that goes undetected in the first place.

This is the circularity at the heart of the “fraud is rare” consensus. The statistic measures prosecutions. It is then offered as proof about incidence. But you cannot establish the rate of a crime by counting convictions when the relevant authorities decline to prosecute — and you certainly cannot do it when the system is designed so that the crime is rarely discovered at all.

Fairfax County Is the Proof

Consider Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest jurisdiction, in the shadow of the nation’s capital.

In September 2024, Fairfax County’s electoral board adopted a policy requiring the general registrar to refer individuals identified by the Virginia Department of Elections as potential noncitizens to the commonwealth’s attorney and the attorney general. The referrals went out month after month. In a single batch on Oct. 6, 2025, the registrar referred 71 individuals. An earlier batch that summer sent 78 names forward. Over roughly a year and a half of monthly referrals, the cumulative total ran well into the hundreds.

Yet on Feb. 19, 2026, the board voted to rescind the policy. The stated reason, according to the meeting minutes, was that the policy had not led to a single prosecution, that compliance consumed “significant” staff time at the elections office, the commonwealth’s attorney, and the attorney general’s office, and that no prosecutor would find that checking a box on a DMV form met the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard.

Read that again. Hundreds of referrals. Zero prosecutions. Policy abandoned as too burdensome.

And here is the part that matters for the statistic: Because none of those cases were prosecuted, not one of them will ever appear in the Heritage database — or in any of the academic tallies that journalists cite when they write that noncitizen voting is infinitesimally rare. The cases were found. They were referred. They were dropped. And their disappearance from the record is then cited as evidence that there was nothing there.

The context is worse than the referral numbers suggest. Fairfax County canceled 985 registrations on citizenship grounds between January 2022 and July 2024 alone; county Republicans count 1,912 cancellations over four years, including 538 in 2025 — more than one per day. Virginia removed 6,303 statewide between January 2022 and July 2024.

Crucially, Virginia does not verify citizenship at registration. It cannot; federal law forbids requiring documentary proof on the federal form. So these registrations surfaced only when the registrants disclosed their own status — typically on a jury questionnaire or a DMV transaction. Nobody went looking. The system caught only the people who raised their hands.

Fairfax Is Not an Outlier

Similar findings have emerged across the country:

Ohio: Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced in August 2024 that his office had identified 597 individuals who registered to vote despite not being citizens. Of those, 138 appeared to have actually cast ballots. He referred them to the attorney general.

Texas: Gov. Greg Abbott announced that more than 6,500 noncitizens had been removed from the state’s rolls in the three years preceding the 2024 election. After that election, the secretary of state referred 33 potential noncitizen voters for criminal investigation.

Alabama: Secretary of State Wes Allen identified 3,251 registered voters who had at some point been issued noncitizen identification numbers, and he directed county boards to move them to inactive status pending citizenship verification.

Tennessee: Election officials sent letters to more than 14,000 registered voters identified through Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security records, asking them to verify their U.S. citizenship.

Louisiana: Gov. Jeff Landry ordered the Office of Motor Vehicles to “compile a list of people who have been issued a temporary license or ID card” for cross-checking against the voter file. Louisiana’s OMV had issued more than 40,000 temporary IDs to noncitizens and non-permanent residents.

North Carolina: In June of this year, DHS announced that they had identified 1,599 potential non-U.S. citizens on North Carolina voter rolls. Federal prosecutors indicted and subsequently sentenced to federal prison a Canadian citizen for falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen and voting in both the 2022 and 2024 elections.

Virginia: During the 14-month period from May 2023 to June 2024, 1,973 unique voter records were marked for removal by the Virginia Department of Elections (ELECT) with the reason “Determined Non-Citizen.” Of those 1,973 records, 399 unique voter ID’s also had a record of casting one or more ballots in the accumulated vote history data, according to the Electoral Process Education Corp (EPEC).

Officials in these states will readily tell you that the numbers are preliminary, that some flagged individuals turn out to be naturalized citizens, and that registration is not the same as voting. All true, and worth saying. But note what those caveats concede: Nobody actually knows. Which is precisely the point.

What Honest Language Would Look Like

The defensible sentence is not “Noncitizen voting is extremely rare.” The defensible sentence is: We do not systematically verify citizenship at registration, we detect ineligible registrations mostly by accident, and when we do detect them, we usually decline to prosecute.

That is a different claim entirely. The first implies a settled empirical finding. The second describes a system that has arranged, more or less deliberately, not to know the answer — and then treats its own ignorance as reassurance.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether President Donald Trump’s executive order on election security is the right remedy, or whether it is even lawful. That fight is now back before Judge Indira Talwani in Boston, and it will not be settled before November. But the debate ought to proceed from an accurate description of what we know and, more importantly, of what we have chosen not to find out.

Fairfax County spent seventeen months finding cases and referring them to prosecutors who did nothing with them. Then it stopped looking. Whatever else that is, it is not evidence that there was nothing to find.

Katharine C. Gorka is the director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Civil Society and the American Dialogue.