The Organized, Well-Funded Strategy Behind the "Noncitizen Voting" Myth

Conspiracy theories about noncitizens casting ballots in U.S. elections have become a centerpiece of MAGA messaging in advance of the 2024 election. Yet it is a manufactured threat, pushed and platformed by a well-funded network of far-right groups, as part of an intentional and highly coordinated effort to misinform the public, advance longstanding right-wing policy goals, and cast doubt on the election results in November.

There is no evidence of noncitizens voting in significant numbers. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson has little more than “intuition” to support his claim that immigrants are casting ballots. Still, noncitizen voting conspiracies have been mainstreamed by influential Republican politicians, amplified by billionaires like Elon Musk, and promoted by a network of election conspiracy theorists.

Some of the same groups and individuals who tried to overturn the 2020 election—like Cleta Mitchell of the Election Integrity Network— are now playing a key role in promoting noncitizen voting myths. Mitchell has formed a coalition with other far-right groups to organize grassroots activists, draft federal and state legislation, develop messaging materials, and lobby lawmakers and state election officials to address this nonexistent problem. Their efforts have been embraced by some of the most powerful lawmakers in the country. Several of the groups promoting noncitizen voting conspiracies are intertwined with the influential Conservative Partnership Institute.

This report documents the groups behind this false narrative, the tactics they’re using to manufacture it, and their real goals.

The myth of noncitizen voting links together two of the right's biggest talking points—immigration and the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen—but the goals go beyond just mobilizing voters. MAGA actors are using the fake threat of noncitizen voting for at least three purposes.

First, elevating conspiracies about noncitizen voting lays the groundwork to call the 2024 results into question if far-right Republicans don’t like the outcome. "I realized that we needed to focus on this threat of illegals voting in November because I absolutely believe that that is how they are planning to try to steal the election this year,” Mitchell told right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in a June 25, 2024 podcast appearance. Mitchell asserted, without evidence, that Democrats will "steal" the election “through illegals who are then added to the voter rolls and really directed by these left wing NGOs . . . that are shepherding these migrants all over the country getting them IDs, getting them housing, paid phone cards and food cards and and getting them on the voter rolls.”

Similar claims have been echoed by powerful Republican lawmakers. House Speaker Johnson declared that Democrats “want to turn illegal aliens into voters,” and Trump’s vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance, asserted that Vice President Kamala Harris’s “party wants more power, and the way they’re going to do it is she wants to give all those illegal aliens the right to vote.” As the New Yorker noted, "The big lie of a stolen election is predicated on the smaller one that non-citizens are voting."

Second, these conspiracies are being used to advance strict voting laws and policies that ultimately disenfranchise U.S. citizens. At the federal level, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives claimed that it was addressing the manufactured threat of noncitizen voting by passing the the SAVE Act in July 2024, which would require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. Since last year, 20 similar proof of citizenship bills have been introduced in 13 states, and one has passed in Louisiana. With backing from Mitchell and her projects, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) also adopted model legislation aimed at the fake threat of noncitizen voting.

Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and requires that voters attest under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen when registering. Demanding that voters show documents proving their citizenship status might sound superficially appealing, but it presents a problem: roughly 1 in 10 American citizens don’t have access to the documents required under these proposals, like a birth certificate or passport, and would face substantial hurdles in gaining access to the ballot box. In this way, a proof of citizenship requirement functions like an even stricter voter ID requirement.

Third, MAGA activists and state officials are using noncitizen voting as a pretext to challenge the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters, which can intimidate lawful voters and create new hurdles for U.S. citizens to cast ballots. Activists associated with Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network are seeking to challenge voter eligibility based on “ethnic names,” and in states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Texas, Tennessee, and Alabama, state officials are threatening that voters may be removed from the voter rolls if they don’t provide proof of citizenship—which has already ensnared both naturalized U.S. citizens and natural-born Americans alike.

1. MAGA-aligned groups and activists have organized nationally through the Only Citizens Vote Coalition (OCV), which was founded by Cleta Mitchell and other far-right election conspiracy theorists. The OCV coalition is a group of more than 70 right-wing organizations, including Mitchell's Election Integrity Network and several of its state affiliates; the Election Transparency Initiative, a group led by former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and largely backed by far-right billionaire Dick Uihlein; the Leonard Leo-backed Honest Elections Project; the Immigration Accountability Project, a group tied to Mitchell’s Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) and formed by veterans of the nativist group Numbers USA; as well as CPI itself and organizations launched by CPI, such as Stephen Miller's America First Legal. OCV itself is a project of another Mitchell-led group, the FAIR Elections Fund. Mitchell is on the board of the Bradley Foundation, once described as the “big money behind the big lie” and which has funded several groups in the coalition.

2. The Only Citizens Vote Coalition has assembled materials for activists to promote noncitizen voting conspiracy theories at the local level, and made them available through the Tea Party Patriots website. The group has created various powerpoint presentations, handouts, posters, and printable signs in Spanish and English warning “If you are NOT a citizen of the United States of America, it is ILLEGAL for you to vote.” The materials are being utilized and distributed by Election Integrity Network activists in states around the country, as part of a push to hold sign-waving events, with Election Integrity Network chapters in states like North Carolina posting up in Sam’s Club parking lots. Mitchell appears to have played a key role in producing coalition materials: for example, Only Citizens Vote resources acknowledge Mitchell's role in their creation, and a coalition report published in August 2024 includes the same text from a memo that Mitchell distributed in February of that year.

The OCV coalition also created toolkits for activists and lawmakers for its "National Only Citizens Vote week" in September 2024. The toolkits contains letters to the editor that activists are encouraged to "copy-and-paste," media advisories to book activists on local news outlets, as well as memes for activists to replicate and spread online.

Activists have discussed targeting immigrant communities with these materials; activists have described plans to hand out “it is ILLEGAL for you to vote” flyers at Latino churches and have also pushed to hang versions of these signs at polling locations. Some states have barred the practice, but Georgia’s State Election Board adopted rules allowing for “U.S. Citizens Only” signs at the polls; the Only Citizens Vote coalition is sharing the same sign with activists.

3. Conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting could directly impact the voting rights of U.S. citizens in the 2024 elections. For years, Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has been recruiting MAGA activists to become poll workers and election observers, and creating structures for filing mass voter challenges. The group is now directing its focus towards phantom noncitizen voters. Mitchell told Charlie Kirk in June 2024 that her network will create “a national neighborhood watch to try to find these pockets of non-citizens that are getting added to the rolls."

Activists associated with Mitchell’s network have described plans to challenge the eligibility of voters they suspect of being noncitizens based on a review of “ethnic names," raising the prospect of U.S. citizens facing intimidation or other hurdles when they try to vote simply because they are not white.

“People are going to have to be pains in the ass,” a former Trump Administration official named John Zadrozny told the Georgia Election Integrity Network chapter in September 2024. “You’ve got to be creative without breaking the law.”

5. Many of the groups promoting noncitizen voting conspiracies are intertwined with the Conservative Partnership Institute ("CPI"). Mitchell, a senior fellow at CPI, helped draft the SAVE Act and co-founded the Only Citizens Vote coalition. The CPI-launched Election Integrity Network is providing the organizational muscle and grassroots army behind the coalition, with activists associated with the Network pushing noncitizen voting measures in states like Tennessee and Ohio. Stephen Miller of the CPI-launched America First Legal stood next to House Speaker Johnson and Cleta Mitchell at the press conference announcing the SAVE Act, and his group sent letters to state election officials urging them to obtain federal citizenship information on suspected noncitizen voters, a flawed approach that has previously led to U.S. citizens being improperly removed from the rolls. America First Legal has also filed a lawsuit to force Arizona’s Maricopa County to reference federal databases. The CPI-launched State Freedom Caucus Network organized a letter of support for the SAVE Act from right-wing state lawmakers, in coordination with the Only Citizens Vote coalition. The board of the newly-created Immigration Accountability Project includes CPI’s Ed Corrigan, Wesley Denton, and John Zadrozny, which suggests the group is part of the CPI universe.

6. The Only Citizens Vote Coalition sponsored the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) annual meeting in July 2024, where coalition leaders like Cleta Mitchell, Ken Cuccinelli, and the Immigration Accountability Project’s Chris Chmielenski presented on a panel focused on noncitizen voting. (Mitchell’s FAIR Elections Fund also paid to sponsor the meeting.) An ALEC task force voted to adopt two policies backed by the coalition: an “Only Citizens Vote” model policy to make it easier for election officials to purge voters, and a resolution supporting state constitutional amendments to ban local governments from allowing noncitizens to vote in school board or other municipal elections. A representative for the pharmaceutical lobby, PhRMA, chaired the task force.

7. State officials hunting for noncitizens on the rolls have targeted or removed thousands of registered voters, ensnaring U.S. citizens in the process. The Secretary of State in Alabama deactivated the registrations of 3,000 people—which included naturalized U.S. citizens and natural-born U.S. citizens. Tennessee officials sent letters to 14,000 registered voters—including naturalized U.S. citizens—threatening that they may be removed from the voter rolls if they don’t provide proof of citizenship. Officials in states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Texas have described similar measures. Among other issues, these efforts could intimidate eligible naturalized voters from casting a ballot, and result in erroneous changes to a voter’s registration status.

In rare instances, human error can result in a small number of noncitizens ending up on the voter rolls, and they are typically removed as part of the normal list-maintenance process. But with noncitizen voting myths exploding on the right, even potentially routine list maintenance is being blown up into proof of the conspiracy.

For example, Ohio’s Secretary of State Frank LaRose—a notorious MAGA clout chaser—has issued multiple press releases announcing his efforts to target noncitizen voting, and trumpeted claims about alleged noncitizen voting in conservative media. (LaRose also is seeking access to federal databases after America First Legal’s letter urging him to do so.) But the small number of alleged noncitizen registration cases that Ohio identified in 2024 roughly aligns with the number of cases identified in previous years, almost none of which led to convictions.

8. The federal SAVE Act and analogous state bills will ultimately impact the voting rights of U.S. citizens. The bills claim to address the manufactured threat of noncitizen voting by requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. But roughly 1 in 10 Americans don’t have ready access to the documents required under these proposals, like a birth certificate or passport, according to research by the Brennan Center for Justice, VoteRiders, the University of Maryland Center for Civic Democracy and Engagement (CDCE), and Public Wise.

There are multiple reasons for this. Many Americans never obtained certain forms of documentary evidence of citizenship—less than half of all Americans have a passport, for example. Other documents might be lost, or difficult to access. A person’s birth certificate might be at their parent’s house, potentially in a different state, or in a safe deposit box. And voters are busy: even if a person has the necessary documents, making an additional trip to a bank deposit box, or asking a family member to mail a birth certificate, creates unnecessary steps that will prevent some voters from registering to vote.

As those groups note, “ballots cast by noncitizens are vanishingly rare. Requiring proof of citizenship would solve nothing, but it would create major barriers to registration for eligible voters, especially those who already face disproportionate barriers to participation in our democracy.”

The SAVE Act was drafted in part by Cleta Mitchell, and House Speaker Johnson introduced the bill at a press conference that featured Mitchell and other controversial right-wing figures, including Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots and Stephen Miller of America First Legal. The SAVE Act won’t become law in 2024– but will almost certainly be reintroduced in the next Congress.

9. Noncitizen voting conspiracies have also given momentum to ballot measures that would ban local governments from allowing noncitizens to vote in municipal elections. Eight states will have these measures on the November 2024 ballot, which generally rewrite state constitutions to provide that “only” citizens can vote, as opposed to “every” or “all” citizen(s) can vote. Taken alone, banning local noncitizen voting laws won’t provide a strategic benefit to MAGA Republicans—the way that restrictive proof of citizenship laws would, by suppressing legal votes—but it appear to be viewed as a wedge issue that can help with turnout in a presidential election year. These measures have largely been pushed by the group “Americans for Citizen Voting,” with support from EIN activists in states like North Carolina.

10. Many of the noncitizen voting conspiracies have revolved around President’s Biden’s 2021 executive order 14019, which urged federal agencies to find ways to expand voter registration and education efforts. Promoting nonpartisan voter registration is consistent with longstanding federal law, and has led states like Kentucky, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to partner with agencies like the Department of Veteran Affairs to help veterans register to vote. But in the whirlwind of conspiracy theories that grew in the wake of the 2020 election, the executive order has been portrayed as a Biden administration effort to "rig" elections, and beginning this year, has been described—without evidence—as part of a conspiracy to encourage noncitizens to register and vote.

Notably, throughout 2022 and 2023, groups that are otherwise intensely focused on immigration policy–like Stephen Miller’s America First Legal and Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America—never mentioned noncitizen voting in their own critiques of Biden's executive order. The recent, rapid shift in messaging about the executive order hints at the coordinated, intentional effort to elevate the noncitizen voting myth as a top issue in the 2024 election.

11. MAGA Republicans cannot point to evidence of noncitizens voting in substantial numbers, and instead rely on “intuition” and cherry-picked data to support their conspiracy theories. For example, when asked for evidence of noncitizens illegally voting, House Speaker Mike Johnson said “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable." Activists also point to a 2014 study that claimed noncitizens might be voting in U.S. elections, ignoring that the study has been repeatedly discredited and debunked, and whose author has more recently concluded that noncitizen voting is extremely rare. Still, these and other thinly-sourced, easily-disprovable claims have circulated across the right-wing media ecosphere, often amplified by billionaire Elon Musk.

Notably, much of the rhetoric around noncitizen voting echoes the racist “Great Replacement theory,” which falsely asserts that liberal elites are conspiring to replace white Americans with people of color.

12. Conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting are laying the groundwork to call the 2024 results into question if MAGA Republicans don’t like the outcome. Conspiracies generated in advance of the 2020 election would go on to support efforts to falsely question that election’s results, and eventually, lead to the January 6 attack on the capitol. Noncitizen voting myths can predictably follow a similar path.

In the wake of the 2024 election, more sophisticated, lawyerly MAGA politicians and activists might point to alleged “loopholes” that they claim could theoretically allow noncitizens to register to vote, and argue that those irregularities should cast doubt on the results, even in the absence of evidence of noncitizen voting.

But some will take it several steps further—arguing that the Biden/Harris administration imported immigrants, added them to the voter rolls, and pushed them to illegally vote in order to steal the election. Those claims may be used by election officials to refuse to certify results, and by activists and powerful elected officials to support other aggressive tactics to overturn the will of voters.

14. The State Freedom Caucus Network, launched out of CPI and closely affiliated with the House Freedom Caucus, has played an important role in introducing and pushing proof of citizenship bills in several states across the country. These state-based efforts began gaining momentum after Arizona passed a controversial proof of citizenship bill in 2022, setting up litigation about the extent to which states can regulate federal elections. Rep. Jake Hoffman, who chairs the Arizona Freedom Caucus, was the lead sponsor on the bill, and developed it along with the Heritage Foundation. The State Freedom Caucus Network also organized a letter of support for the SAVE Act from right-wing state lawmakers, in coordination with the Only Citizens Vote coalition.

As state legislators come into session in early 2025, lawmakers are likely to introduce and enact a wave of noncitizen voting bills, particularly after ALEC adopted model legislation on the topic.