Non-citizen voting: Utah finds just 13 invalid ballots out of millions cast 

After completing a year-long audit, Utah’s election chief said Wednesday that her office only found a tiny number of noncitizens on the state’s voter roll: Out of more than two million registered voters, only 27 were confirmed noncitizens.

Of the 27 confirmed noncitizen voters found in the audit, only 13 of them voted in an election since 2018. Thirteen illegitimate voters in Utah’s past four general elections amount to .00025% of the roughly 5,156,392 votes cast in those elections.

The results of the audit, conducted by the office of Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson (R), undercut the long-running false claims of widespread noncitizen voting, which the Trump administration is using to aggressively attack voting rights and implement harsh restrictions on voting.

The audit also identified an additional 25 registered voters who were flagged as “probable noncitizens,” and now have 30 days to provide proof of citizenship before they’re removed from the state’s voter roll. Of those 25 “probable noncitizens,” nine of them have voted in elections since 2016.

The audit also flagged an additional 5,007 registrants whose citizenship status could not be verified, because they registered to vote before a law passed that required either a driver’s license or Social Security number for voter registration. 

In other words, 99.72% of the state’s registered voters were verified U.S. citizens. And of the many millions of votes cast in Utah’s elections since 2016, a total of 22 were cast by either a noncitizen or “probable noncitizen” voter. 

Beyond the minuscule number of noncitizens identified on the state’s voter roll, the most significant revelation from Utah’s audit is the unreliability of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to verify citizenship status, which the Trump administration has been aggressively pushing to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls throughout the country. 

During the audit, Henderson’s office flagged that 2.9% of the state’s voter registrations lacked either a driver’s license, Social Security, or both. 

In order to update voter registration records for those voters, Henderson’s office said they used data from both the SAVE database and the Utah Driver License Division (DLD). 

“While we found information obtained from the DLD or SAVE to be reliable in confirming whether an individual is a citizen, it was not reliable in indicating an individual was not a citizen, without considering other factors,” Henderson said in a summary of the audit. “For example, delays in federal agencies updating recently naturalized citizens’ records, and naturalized citizens failing to update their information with the DLD could result in the inability of those systems to confirm citizenship.”

The results of Utah’s audit align with facts that are largely ignored by Republicans and the Trump administration: voter fraud and noncitizen voting is extremely rare.

In March, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon admitted that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) only unearthed a tiny amount of illegitimate votes cast in the last few elections as a result of its nationwide voter roll grab. While Dhillon tried to play up the “dozens” of instances of voter fraud DOJ discovered as a major scandal in an interview, 50 illegitimate votes would amount to just 0.000007 percent of the roughly 680 million votes cast in the last five national elections.