Former President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Republican influencers all amplified a false claim on social media that suggests 2 million noncitizens have registered to vote without photo ID in three swing states this year.
An Instagram post included screenshots of X posts from DC_Draino and End Wokeness, two popular social media accounts that we have previously fact checked.
“Over 8 million illegal aliens have invaded America under Biden,” the screenshot of the DC_Draino X image read. “Now we learn more than 2 million voter registrations have been completed *WITHOUT VOTER ID* in the past 3 months in 3 crucial states for 2024. Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Now you know why the border is open.”
The post’s second slide contains a screenshot from End Wokeness that was reshared by Elon Musk on X with the text “extremely concerning.” Musk has repeatedly shared voting and immigration misinformation on the platform he owns.
The End Wokeness post claimed, “The number of voters registering without a photo ID is SKYROCKETING in 3 key swing states: Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Since the start of 2024: TX: 1,250,710 PA: 580,513 AZ: 220,731.”
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
We saw similar statements on X, TikTok and Facebook. On Truth Social,former President Donald Trump asked who are the millions of voters registering without photo ID.
The figures in the social posts represent the number of times states have verified voters’ Social Security numbers. This process is done with the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV). HAVV is a system established in 2004 where states can verify a voter’s identification with the Social Security Administration.
State or local election officials in the three states — including Republicans — said that the figures do not accurately reflect the number of voters’ who registered without photo ID. All of the election officials said they take steps to ensure that only eligible citizens cast ballots and had no evidence of widespread voter registration by noncitizens.
“The data does not represent the numbers of newly registered voters, and any representation they do is false,” Ellen Lyon, a spokesperson at Pennsylvania’s Department of State, told PolitiFact.
We told the End Wokeness social media user that voting officials from the three states said the data was misrepresented in the social post. The author of the account responded by saying “it is deeply concerning that ANYONE is registering to vote without a photo ID” and criticized mail-in voting. Texas and Arizona require a photo ID to vote, but Pennsylvania does not.
The Social Security Administration’s press office did not immediately respond to our questions about the data.
States also use the system to verify new voters who do not use a photo ID when registering to vote. As a result, the same voter’s Social Security number could be potentially verified multiple times in one year.
For example, in Pennsylvania, according to the Department of State, there have only been 75,000 new voter registrations, making it impossible that 580,513 voters registered without photo ID as the claim asserts.
“In Pennsylvania, the Department of State uses the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) to check partial social security numbers (SSN) not only for voter registration applications, but also for absentee and mail ballot applications,” Lyon said.
The Social Security Administration’s data represents the raw number of times a state checks a voter’s social security verification. The database also does not show the number of noncitizens who registered this year without a photo ID. Nor does it verify their citizenship status.
In Texas, only 57,711 new voters have registered this year, according to Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a former Republican state senator.
Her office released a statement earlier this month calling the 1.2 million figure in social media posts “clearly incorrect.”
“When Texans register to vote they must provide a driver license number or a Social Security number. When an individual registers to vote with just a SSN, the state verifies that the SSN is authentic,” the statement explained.
Arizona has taken similar steps to counter the inaccurate social media claims.
Stephen Richer, Arizona’s Republican Maricopa County Recorder, replied to Musk’s post on X, explaining how the claim is inaccurate.
“There is 0 validity to the suggestion in the original post that 220,731 illegal immigrants have registered in Arizona in 2024,” Richer wrote.
Richer said that in Arizona there have only been about 60,000 new voter registrations this year and Social Security verifications are used to check proof of identity, not to check citizenship status.
Screenshot from X
JP Martin, a spokesperson for Arizona’s secretary of state, told PolitiFact that 90% of verification of citizenship proof is done through the Motor Vehicles Division in Arizona, not through the Social Security Administration. In an Arizona voting case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that states are obligated to permit registration for federal elections using a federal form that does not require documentary proof of citizenship. That means that Arizona provides voters who lack proof with a “federal only” ballot. The state has about 35,000 people on the federal only list out of the roughly 4 million voters, Martin said.
That number is nearly eight times smaller than the amount of HAVV queries that were made to verify voter’s Social Security numbers.
An article by Votebeat Arizona found that the majority of federal-only voters in Arizona are college-age students who may not be able to easily access documents that prove their citizenship.
Amid a high number of border encounters this year, viral social media accounts and some politicians including Trump have continued to spread the long-standing falsehood of mass voting by noncitizens.
Noncitizens occasionally cast ballots, but this is rare. Most noncitizens don’t want to risk jail time (or deportation if they are here illegally) by casting a ballot. Election officials take several steps to ensure that only eligible voters cast ballots.
Our ruling
An Instagram post claims that the Social Security Administration’s data proves that more than 2 million noncitizens registered to vote without photo ID in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Texas this year.
But the data does not reflect the number of noncitizens who have registered to vote without a photo ID. The data shows the amount of times states have verified voters’ Social Security numbers. States can request to verify the same voter’s Social Security number multiple times.
State officials from Arizona, Pennsylvania and Texas said the numbers of people who registered to vote this year in their respective states are significantly smaller than the figures cited in the post.
We rate this claim False.
PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman contributed to this report.