Are non-citizens illegally voting? We check Ted Cruz’s claim that Dems want their votes

In Reality Check stories, Star-Telegram journalists dig deeper into questions over facts, consequences and accountability. Read more. Story idea? RealityCheck@star-telegram.com.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz claimed Democrats want the votes of people who are in the country illegally during a Tuesday speech at the Republican National Convention.

Cruz, whose remarks in Milwaukee focused on the impacts of illegal immigration across the southern border, decried the Biden administration for allowing violent criminals to in the country illegally. (Though people who enter the U.S. illegally are not more likely to commit crimes, according to experts.)

“How did we get here?” Cruz posed from the convention stage. “It happened because Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children.”

He didn’t go as far as saying non-U.S. citizens are voting in elections, but some may wonder: Is that happening? It’s not, according to experts.

PoltiFact was quick to debunk that idea Tuesday night, pointing to a fact check of a similar claim by former President Donald Trump that was labeled as “Pants on Fire” on its Truth-O-Meter, assessing the validity of claims. The fact-checking website notes that only U.S. citizens can vote and cases of non-citizens voting are rare and that they found “no effort by the left to register people in the country illegally.”

The Brennan Center for Justice conducted a study of voting in the 2016 general election, finding 30 incidents of non-citizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast in 42 juristictions across the country.

A scholar at the CATO Institute, as the Brennan Center’s director of Voting Rights pointed out in his own piece, also found that people who are not U.S.. citizens do not vote in “detectable numbers.”

“There are likely many problems with America’s voting system and there is no doubt that a non-zero number of non-citizens illegally voted, but there is no good evidence that non-citizens voted illegally in large enough numbers to actually shift the outcome of elections or even change the number of electoral votes,” Alex Nowrasteh, the CATO Institute’s vice president for economic and social policy studies, wrote in a November 2020 piece.

Looking beyond the question of whether people who are not U.S. Citizens are voting illegally, election experts have said there’s little evidence of widespread voter fraud, including in Texas and in Tarrant County.