Unverified Claims About Noncitizen Voting Undermine Trust in Democracy, Here's What the Evidence Actually Shows

Democracy only works when people trust the system. That's why it matters when false claims about how elections work get repeated and amplified, even after they've been thoroughly investigated and debunked.

According to the Washington Post, President Trump on Tuesday repeated long-standing claims that noncitizens voted in significant numbers during the 2020 election. These allegations have been central to his assertions that the election was rigged.

Why This Matters

Election security is real. Voter confidence is real. But so is evidence. When false claims about election integrity circulate without correction, two things happen: people lose faith in the democratic process itself, and actual threats to voting access, like voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and polling place closures, get harder to address because the conversation becomes about conspiracy theories instead of facts.

This connects directly to what the Common Good Party stands for: Common Ground, our pillar on fixing democracy itself. We believe in "real choices at the ballot, transparency and anti-corruption with teeth." That means taking election security seriously. It also means being ruthlessly honest about what the evidence actually shows.

What We Know About Noncitizen Voting

Multiple investigations, including reviews by election officials from both parties, the Trump administration's own Department of Homeland Security, and independent academic researchers, have found no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting in 2020. A comprehensive analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, which studied noncitizen voting across multiple election cycles, found the rate to be between 0.0003% and 0.0025%, meaning somewhere between 1 in 400,000 to 1 in 30,000 votes cast.

That's not zero. But it's also not a rigged election. It's a system catching the tiny fraction of attempts that occur.

The distinction matters. Real election security means catching problems where they exist and fixing actual vulnerabilities. Unverified claims about phantom voters do the opposite: they distract from genuine threats to voting access and undermine public confidence in legitimate results.