Utah reviewed its voter rolls for noncitizens. It found one. Who never voted

After a sweeping, Republican-led review of more than 2 million voter registrations, Utah election officials identified just one apparent noncitizen in their voter rolls — who never voted. 

The results sharply undercut the narrative of widespread noncitizen voting Republicans are using to promote new nationwide restrictions on voting.

The finding comes as Republicans in Congress renew their push for the SAVE Act, a bill that would require voters to show proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, and as the Trump administration’s Justice Department intensifies efforts to obtain voter rolls from states nationwide.

According to Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson (R), the state’s chief elections officer, the months-long review examined 2,069,640 active voter registrations using state driver’s license records, federal immigration databases and manual verification. More than 99.9% of voters were confirmed as U.S. citizens. 

The lone noncitizen identified was removed from the rolls and was confirmed to have never voted.

Elections officials said hundreds of other records flagged during the process reflected missing information or data errors, not evidence of illegal voting.

Officials also acknowledged that four noncitizens were identified in a separate voter roll cleanup conducted before the current review began. Those cases were linked to a now-fixed issue in Utah’s voter registration system that allowed applicants to proceed even after indicating they were not U.S. citizens. All four were promptly removed from the voter rolls, and state election director Ryan Cowley said that investigators were still determining whether any of them cast ballots. 

The results are a devastating rebuttal to the central premise behind the SAVE Act — that large numbers of noncitizens are registering and voting undetected — a claim repeatedly invoked by Republican lawmakers.

Still, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the bill’s sponsor, took the news in stride.

“Four too many. Pass SAVE ASAP,” he wrote on X.

The report also comes amid a standoff between Utah and the Justice Department over access to the state’s voter rolls. 

In December, DOJ officials demanded that Utah provide its full, unredacted voter database as part of a nationwide campaign to scrutinize state voter rolls.

Utah officials pushed back, citing privacy concerns, data security risks and conflicting legal obligations. 

In communications with the DOJ, the state emphasized that it already conducts regular voter list maintenance, including address updates, duplicate checks, removals of deceased voters and use of the federal SAVE system to verify citizenship.

Voting rights advocates have long warned that strict proof-of-citizenship requirements risk disenfranchising eligible voters who lack easy access to matching documents like passports or birth certificates, including married women, elderly voters and rural residents.

In announcing the findings, Henderson took aim at the Trump administration’s use of the SAVE system to find non-citizens on the rolls. She called the system “notoriously inaccurate,” and added that it “frequently flags individuals who are, in fact, citizens,” according to a report from a Utah news station.