If you’ve followed the news at all in the last ten years, you’ve heard some version of this claim: people living here illegally are voting, a lot of them, and it’s changing who wins.
In January 2017, President Trump told congressional leaders that 3 to 5 million illegal votes cost him the popular vote. In 2024, Speaker Mike Johnson said “we all know, intuitively” that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. This fall, the Justice Department has been announcing new charges almost every week, and DHS says it has 300,000 more cases “that we’re getting to.”
If that’s true, it matters, and we should want to know. I was curious what the real numbers were, so I went looking and put what I found on one page: doillegalsvote.com.
It answers one question: how many people living here illegally have been caught voting? It’s not a site about immigration policy. You can land anywhere on immigration and still want the right number. Every number is on the site with a link to its source, so I’d rather use this post for what I learned getting there.
First off, I started with one of the sources cited most by people who say voter fraud is a real problem. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, keeps a database of proven election fraud cases, built “to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system.” I wanted a number nobody could wave off as biased, so I counted Heritage’s own cases.
That was harder than it sounds. My count started at 16, which is what the American Immigration Council (a pro-immigration group) found in Heritage’s database in August. It went up to 21 once I searched all 1,619 of Heritage’s entries, not only the ones it files as noncitizen cases, and added four newer federal convictions. Then it went down to 13: nine from Heritage and the four federal convictions.
It went down because I set a rule. A case only counts with proof of a ballot: a conviction for voting, a guilty plea or signed statement admitting it, or a court’s finding that they voted. The person also has to be shown, in a court record or by the prosecutor, to have had no legal status. Registering isn’t voting, and a charge isn’t proof. Neither is a database’s summary of a case, and Heritage’s were wrong more than once. One man in its database was never charged with voting at all. He pleaded guilty to Social Security fraud. The cases that didn’t make the cut are listed on the page with the reason for each, so you can disagree with me one case at a time.
Then it went back up. Heritage calls its database a sample, not a census, so I went looking for the cases it missed, in federal court records, Justice Department releases and the records of prosecutors in 31 states. That turned up cases Heritage never logged, plus three of its own entries that qualified once I read the court records. That brought the count to at least 26, and every one of them passes the same rule. That’s how it should work. A count that only moves in the direction you want is hard to trust.
Next, Heritage hasn’t updated its database since December 2025, so it can’t see this year’s crackdown. For that, I follow the Justice Department’s own announcements and check the courts for new pleas and verdicts every week. Nine of the 26 were convicted after the current administration took office. That’s the same Justice Department leading the crackdown, so it’s hard to argue it isn’t looking.
Going in, I already figured illegal votes weren’t deciding elections. Seeing the numbers made it clear how inconsequential it really is.
Some people here illegally have voted. That part is true, and it’s a crime. The claim we keep hearing is bigger than that, though. It’s that enough of them vote to change who wins, and nothing I found supports it.
To test that, I looked at every statewide federal race since 2000 that was close enough for the loosest count on the site to matter. There are thirteen of them. In every one, all the noncitizen cases the site found in that state, every year combined, add up to less than the margin. House races can be closer still, and the site says so: Iowa’s 2nd district was decided by six votes in 2020.
The closest thing I found is a city council race in Compton, California, in 2001. A judge removed the winner for helping noncitizens register and vote. It’s the one result in Heritage’s whole database that was overturned over noncitizen voting.
Now, the obvious pushback: those are just the ones who got caught. That’s fair, and it’s why 26 is a floor. It’s also why the site covers the states that checked every name on their voter rolls. Most were run by Republicans, and they found dozens of noncitizens who had voted, not thousands. Other states have flagged thousands of possible noncitizens, but a flag isn’t a finding.
So, the biggest thing I actually learned is who’s doing it. Most noncitizens caught voting are here legally, usually with a green card, and that’s true of the people charged this fall too. It’s still a crime, since no noncitizen can vote in a federal or state election, but it isn’t the claim.
Some of them say they were told they could vote. One Florida green card holder told immigration officers that a woman came to her house and said permanent residents could now vote. That doesn’t prove why anyone voted, and the site says so. But when people who are here legally keep ending up on the rolls and casting ballots, something in that process is broken.
The other thing I learned is how easy it is to register a noncitizen by mistake. New Jersey’s motor vehicle agency registered 6,600 noncitizens through a software error in 2023 and 2024. Most of them never voted, and a registration isn’t a vote.
So, here’s where I landed. More than 1.5 billion ballots have been cast in federal elections since 2000, and at least 26 people living here illegally are proven to have voted. That’s about one for every 58 million ballots, and none of it adds up to enough to have decided a statewide race. With the midterms coming up, that’s the number I want in people’s heads, not 3 to 5 million.
If you think I got something wrong, I really want to know what, and corrections@doillegalsvote.com is the place to tell me.
P.S. Since I said I’d tell you where AI fits: I built the site with Claude’s help, for the research, checking every source and building the page. That included checking the data against all 293 people the federal courts’ own case database lists as charged under a federal voting law since 2000, which I’d never have found the time to do on my own. When a case was borderline, Claude laid out the record and I made the call.
P.P.S. The domain says “illegals” because that’s the word people use when they make this claim out loud. It isn’t a word I’d use for anyone. The AP Stylebook has said since 2013 that illegal should describe an action, not a person, and it keeps “illegals” out of everything but direct quotes. It suggests “living in a country illegally” or “without legal permission” instead, so the page itself says “people living here illegally.”