On Fox News Sunday, four days after the country marked its 250th birthday, the Speaker of the House explained why he will move the SAVE America Act through the budget process this month. Requiring proof of citizenship and a photo ID to vote, Mike Johnson said, "eliminates so much of the problem, all the fraud and everything that everybody's concerned about in our elections, particularly, frankly, in these blue states" [1][2].
Two claims are stacked in that sentence: that noncitizen voting is a large problem, and that it lives in Democratic states. The evidence for both has been counted, repeatedly, by people with no reason to undercount it.
Start with the size. The Brennan Center reviewed the 2016 general election across 42 jurisdictions that together tallied 23.5 million votes. Election officials in those jurisdictions referred about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation - roughly 0.0001 percent of the ballots cast [3].
Data
| 2016 votes reviewed (23.5 million) | 23,500,000 suspected noncitizen incidents |
|---|---|
| Suspected noncitizen incidents | 30 suspected noncitizen incidents |
Now the geography. Georgia's secretary of state, a Republican, ran a citizenship audit of the state's voter rolls and flagged about 1,700 attempted registrations over 25 years - and found that none of them had cast a ballot. Nevada's 2016 audit turned up three noncitizen votes out of more than 1.1 million [4]. The pattern is not a blue-state pattern. It is a near-zero pattern everywhere anyone has looked, in red states and blue.
What the bill would do is not near-zero. Requiring every registrant to produce documentary proof of citizenship falls hardest on citizens whose paperwork does not line up on demand: married women whose birth certificates carry a maiden name, older voters born at home without a filed certificate, rural and low-income people who do not hold a passport. The Speaker is proposing to put a document check between millions of eligible citizens and the voter roll to stop a number of fraudulent votes that fits on one hand per state.
Johnson paired the voting claim with a second one, that the 14th Amendment has been "devalued" by birth tourism [2]. Fact-checkers put birth tourism at an estimated 5,000 to 26,000 births a year against roughly 3.6 million total US births, and the Supreme Court has already ruled against the administration's attempt to end birthright citizenship by order [5]. The theme is consistent: a small or settled thing, described from the largest stage available as a threat that only a sweeping new rule can contain.
The honest version of the Speaker's sentence would be short. Proof-of-citizenship registration would stop a handful of votes and could block a great many voters, and the fraud it invokes is not concentrated in blue states because it is barely anywhere at all. That version does not move a stalled bill. The one he said on Sunday might.
