Fact check: Undocumented immigrants and voting
It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in the United States.
Several Republican leaders and RNC guests have argued without any evidence that undocumented immigrants are voting in elections.
However, doing so is a federal offense that is punishable by jail time and could lead to deportation.
Although there is no comprehensive database that tracks instances of noncitizen voting on a large scale, there has never been any evidence that proves it has happened on a scale that could have swayed federal elections.
Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation runs a database that contains a sampling of proven instances of election fraud across the United States. By ABC News' count, out of 1,499 proven election fraud cases that they list, they document less than 100 cases of noncitizens voting.
A study by the Brennan Center for Justice that looked at 42 jurisdictions, representing 23.5 million votes, found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting in 2016.