According to Donald Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican Party, one of the most heinous crimes “illegal” immigrants commit is voter fraud – illegally voting in U.S. elections as non-citizens. However, the Republican Party’s own research shows their assertions to be false, some might even label them lies.
Data compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation (HF), the entity behind Project 2025, shows that noncitizen voting in Texas isn’t a widespread problem. Not only that, HF data reveals voter fraud committed by U.S. citizens is more prevalent.
Not only that, U.S. citizen voter fraud, which is said to be extremely rare in Texas and nationwide, is overwhelmingly committed by citizens registered as Republicans.
Case in point, an Iowa woman, Kim Taylor, was sentenced to four months in prison in April after a federal jury convicted her on more than 50 counts of voter fraud as part of a scheme to help her husband in a congressional primary and a county supervisor race. Data shows Taylor is by far more representative of voter fraud, rare though it may be.
Still, since 2017, HF has maintained a database on fraudulent voting, with a mission, in part, to “demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed.” HF’s Texas data dates back to 2005.
Voter Fraud a Non-Issue
HF’s database includes only three instances of noncitizens casting ballots in Texas since 2012. They include:
A Mexican citizen who used her cousin’s identity to vote in several elections, including the 2016 presidential election. She eventually pleaded guilty to two felony charges and was ordered to spend 180 days in jail, according to the database.
The 2018 case of a Salvadoran man who had been in the United States since the 1980s was indicted for falsifying documents to obtain a passport and register to vote. He later pleaded guilty to making a false statement in his passport application.
A Grand Prairie woman who was in the country legally but not a citizen was granted parole in 2019 after spending nine months in prison for unauthorized voting. Reports indicate she voted in 2012 and in the Republican Party primary runoff in 2014.
Heading into the November General Election, HF is one of the loudest voices demonizing noncitizen voting, though statistically, it’s a non-issue.
In response to this reality, HF spokespersons Hans von Spakovsky and Edwin Meese III said the data “does not capture all cases and certainly does not capture reported instances or allegations of election fraud, some of which may be meritorious, some not, that are not investigated or prosecuted.”
A focus on noncitizens from Texas Republicans
The issue of noncitizen (immigrant) crime, including voting, has been headline news nationally, especially after former President Donald Trump made the discredited claim that Haitian immigrants are “eating the pets… they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” of Springfield, Ohio residents.
GOP Double Down
Even with threats and actual acts of violence against Haitian immigrants after Trump’s false claims were made during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, has continued to double down on the falsehoods.
Moreover, HF continues to double down on its claim of rampant illegal voting by noncitizens.
“Has the U.S. Justice Department contacted Texas to ask for the files and voter registration and voter history record on each alien removed?” stated Meese and von Spakovsky, referencing the 6,500 noncitizens Abbott removed from voter rolls during his recent purge of over 1.1 million names from that roll. “I have no doubt the answer is ‘no’ and that there will be no such inquiry by DOJ, so these 6,500 cases will never be added to our database.”
“The lessons to take from Heritage’s own database are that noncitizen voting is not a serious problem and that to the extent rare cases occur, they would be best addressed by better training government workers to recognize immigration documents and follow procedure,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a Washington-based think tank. “The majority of the proven cases in the Heritage database would never have happened but for government workers making mistakes,” he said.