Media Contact
Damien Sharp
The Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government is set to meet this afternoon on “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Noncitizen Voting.” Republicans are pushing for a bill, known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. The House of Representatives will vote this week on a stopgap funding bill that will include the SAVE Act.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, who has practiced immigration law for more than 35 years and teaches immigration and asylum law at Cornell Law School, says that the bill is purely political and seeks to solve a problem that does not exist.
Stephen Yale-Loehr
Professor of immigration law
“Legislation to ban noncitizen voting seeks to solve a problem that does not exist and could impede funding the federal government after September 30.
"The Heritage Foundation actively supports the SAVE Act. But the Heritage Foundation’s own analysis of legal actions regarding election misconduct found only 24 instances of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023. A study conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice analyzing 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election concluded that there were only about 30 instances of noncitizens casting votes. Thus, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.
"Illegal voting, including by noncitizens, is routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities. There is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever changed an election’s outcome. The SAVE Act is pure politics and doesn’t solve anything.”
