What Are the Odds of a Noncitizen Voting? We’re Glad You Asked

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With the Senate taking up the GOP voter suppression bill that is Donald Trump’s top legislative priority, we thought it would be good to take a closer look at the reason why Republicans claim that this legislation is needed: the supposed scourge of noncitizens voting.

People familiar with the debate know that it isn’t much of a problem at all. That’s because it is illegal for non-Americans to vote in federal elections, and since the upside of doing so, i.e., casting one additional ballot among tens of millions of others, stands in no relation to the downside, i.e., imprisonment and deportation, hardly anybody does it.

How rare is it that somebody commits this most pointless of crimes?

We are so glad you asked! Let’s take a look.

Including the 2000 presidential election, which is a great reference point not only because it’s a quarter century in the past but also because it was decided by 537 votes* and therefore any small factor could have made a huge difference, Americans have cast about 1.5 billion ballots in federal elections.

According to the conservative Heritage Foundation, aka “the Project 2025 guys,” aka “a bunch of guys who support voter suppression and are therefore really intent on finding evidence that noncitizens voting is a widespread problem,” exactly 100 aliens have been caught committing voter fraud.

In other words, according to these numbers, one noncitizen is caught trying to vote illegally for every 15,000,000 votes cast.

Or, to put it differently, if you wanted to randomly pick out a non-American at a polling place, you’d have a 1 in 15 million chance to be successful.

Those aren’t great odds.

In fact, here are a few things that are more likely to happen than that:

• You are more likely to be killed by a hippo
• You are more likely to flip a coin 23 times in a row and get heads every time
• You are more likely to be struck twice by lightning
• If you know that your friend lives in California but you don’t know where, you have a better chance to knock on a random door in the entire state and find him in that household
• You are 600 times more likely to be killed by an act of gun violence

That being said, there are some things that are even less likely than finding a noncitizen who votes. For example, getting a Republican to admit the real purpose of this bill, i.e., to make it more difficult for people to vote who are more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, is much more of a longshot.

And, of course, the odds of Trump admitting that he lost the 2020 election fair and square, instead of insisting that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally without being caught, are off the charts.

*Technically, it was decided by the five conservative Supreme Court justices who handed the victory to George W. Bush, but we don’t want to quibble.