Reuters published a report on September 23 outlining its findings that roughly 30,000 noncitizens across a dozen states, including states led by both Democrats and Republicans, have been mistakenly added to voter rolls since 2000, largely due to administrative errors. Reuters’ findings, which note that these noncitizen voter registrations have come in “numbers that experts said were too small … to impact elections,” conflict with narratives pushed by right-wing media and the Trump administration about alleged voter fraud caused by noncitizens on the voter rolls.

As Reuters reported:

US states may have added more than 30,000 self-declared non-citizens to the nation’s voter rolls since 2000 because of software glitches and clerical errors made while processing their driver's license and state ID applications, according to official records reviewed by Reuters.

The cases expose weaknesses in voter registration systems across a dozen US states governed by both Democrats and Republicans, but at numbers that experts said were too small relative to the country’s more than 170 million registered voters to impact elections. Reuters was not able to determine how many of these non-citizens actually cast a ballot.

The findings suggest that inadvertent bureaucratic failures, rather than organized efforts to register immigrants illegally, are a major source of non-citizen registrations, and raise questions about whether legislative efforts to require proof of citizenship for voter registration would eliminate the issue.

Right-wing media figures, in lockstep with the Trump administration, have fearmongered for years about widespread noncitizen voting, often to promote policies that would likely curtail people’s right to vote — a goal of some in right-wing media. These claims have ramped up ahead of the midterms, as the Trump administration and right-wing media push inflated numbers about noncitizen voter registrations to allege widespread voter fraud, all while ignoring that, in reality, these numbers represent just a small fraction of all registered voters.

[Editor's note: If 30,000 non-citizens were added to voter rolls nationally since 2000, that represents 0.07 percent of new enrollments since then, which were roughly 43.85 million of about 175 million registered voters in 2024.]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters