If it ain’t broke, don’t ‘fix’ it

The SAVE Act introduces a requirement that Americans must provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. This additional hurdle presumes there is a serious problem regarding non-citizen immigrants voting. But is there really a significant problem? Here are the facts.

After the 2016 election, the Brennan Center surveyed 42 jurisdictions with high immigrant populations and found just 30 cases of suspected noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast. Idaho, a state of one million voters, found 36 “very likely” registered noncitizens. Keep in mind that not all of these undocumented immigrants even voted! Consider one region of Michigan where there were 15 noncitizens on the voter rolls of over 724,000 registered voters. Turns out only 4 noncitizens actually voted. Louisiana’s investigation in 2025 netted 79 of whom had voted in at least one election over the last 30 years! This was out of 2.9 million registrants! Montana found 23 possible noncitizen registrants (out of 785,000 people registered).

Since Trump is so concerned about election fraud in Georgia, let’s find out how many undocumented immigrants are voting there. In the 2024 elections there were only 20 registered noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters statewide. Only 9 of those actually cast a ballot.

So, what is the overall percentage of these handful of states actually taking the time to find data? It’s 0.0005%!

Non-citizens voting is simply not a problem.

So, why add this extra hurdle? This is just another example of Trump and his Republicans creating chaos to further their immigrant bashing myths.

Now what is a problem is that over 30% of registered voters don’t vote! The number of poor, infirm and elderly Americans who will be severely challenged by these unnecessary restrictions will be measured in millions not hundreds. Instead of making voting more difficult, we should be making it easier. If it ain’t broke, don’t “fix” it.