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Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency he leads claim to have unearthed evidence to prove a longstanding conspiracy theory about Democrats orchestrating illegal voting by noncitizens on a scale large enough to swing national elections in their favor. But voting experts say the claims are highly dubious, and DOGE hasn’t released any evidence.

The allegation is pretty straightforward — but DOGE’s data may not be telling the whole story. Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who is working with DOGE, said the DOGE team matched Social Security numbers given to noncitizens with work visas against voter registration rolls in four sample states, and found thousands of crossovers.

Gracias said “many” of those people actually voted. Moreover, he and Musk allege that it is all part of a Democratic plot to influence federal elections.

DOGE says it provided the data to federal prosecutors for criminal investigation, but nothing has been shared publicly.

Without DOGE’s data, we can’t determine how many cases of noncitizen votes may have been uncovered. But voting and data experts warn that when matching millions of numbers in databases, even a small percentage of errors can distort things. That’s not to say there aren’t any noncitizens who wrongly register to vote, and that there aren’t some who actually do vote. But states that have performed detailed audits of voting records have found such instances to be relatively rare.

In some cases, officials in those states have found hundreds of noncitizens on voter registration rolls, a fraction of whom also voted. But hardly enough to have come close to swinging a national election.

And, voting experts say, the conspiracy falls apart when you weigh the benefit of any single vote against the potential legal consequences faced by someone who votes illegally as a noncitizen — fines, jail time and deportation.

“The evidence is that the number of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections is extremely low, not high enough to have changed the party outcome of any federal election in recent years,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute told us. “Audits and investigations in states like Ohio, Nevada, and North Carolina have found the numbers to be tiny in relation to votes cast. Analysis of voting statistics in parts of the country in areas with large noncitizen populations do not find results consistent with Musk’s claims, and do find results consistent with near-zero attempts by this population to participate in elections. States have many ways to cross-check databases and simply presenting a Social Security card or number will not make you a voter. The consistent experience has been that very few persons in this category mistakenly or deliberately vote.”

The DOGE Claims

In a town hall ahead of an April 1 Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, Musk and Gracias drew attention to a dramatic rise during the Biden presidency in the number of people provided Social Security numbers through the Enumeration Beyond Entry system, a program that provides Social Security numbers and cards to noncitizens who are granted work authorization by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The EBE program, begun in 2017 under the Trump administration, provided an expedited process for immigrants who obtained work permits to be assigned Social Security numbers (and thereby allow the federal government to track their earnings for taxation). That includes immigrants granted humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status due to civil unrest, violence or natural disasters in their home countries and immigrants who may have crossed the border illegally but who initiated an asylum application and were granted a work permit pending their asylum hearing.

As the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General explained in 2019, the EBE program allowed SSA to quickly offer Social Security numbers to these immigrants “because the information needed to assign the SSN” had already been “collected and verified by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for conferring lawful status and work authorization.” (The Trump administration recently suspended the EBE program.)

Here’s a version of the data Gracias posted on X:

We reached out to the Social Security Administration to confirm those numbers, and did not get a response. But it’s not surprising they would have risen dramatically under Biden, who expanded protections for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ukraine and Venezuela. The number of immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. also soared during the Biden years.

“When we saw these numbers, we were like, ‘What is this?’ In ’21 you see 270,000 people goes all the way to 2.1 million in ’24,” Gracias said at the town hall. “These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security numbers.”

“Yeah, this is a mind-blowing chart,” Musk said.

“This is worth just reiterating,” Musk said. “People sometimes think that under the Biden administration that he was simply asleep with the switch. They weren’t asleep with the switch. It was a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people, and make it a permanent deep blue one-party state from which there would be no escape.”

Gracias claimed DOGE found that many of the more than 5 million who had gotten Social Security numbers through the EBE program since its inception in 2017 were also getting various government benefits, including more than 1 million receiving Medicaid. He said he went a step further and decided to match the EBE list against voter records, and discovered many of those people had registered to vote.

“And who did vote,” Musk added.

“And we found some by sampling that actually did vote,” Gracias concurred. “And we have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security Investigation service. Already. Already. That is already happening right now.” (We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to confirm an investigation but did not get a response.)

Musk said that once a noncitizen has obtained a Social Security number “from there you get on the voter rolls and then the basically Dem operatives will farm the vote.”

In an interview on “Fox & Friends” on April 2, Gracias provided a bit more detail, saying that DOGE “found in a handful of cooperative states that they were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted.” He noted that the search it performed was made possible by an executive order signed by Trump allowing inter-agency data-sharing.

“It’s never been done before where agencies could talk to each other and databases could talk to each other,” Gracias said. “That allowed us to connect all this data to find these people across the system, across the benefits system, all the way to the voting records.”

Privacy activists told NPR that despite the executive order, the search may have violated privacy laws and a court order.

Gracias provided still more detail about the alleged illegal noncitizen voting in an interview on the All-In Podcast on April 4.

“I’m talking about four states,” Gracias said, though he did not name the four “friendly states” DOGE sampled. “We looked at the voter rolls, we found these people, thousands of them, on the voter rolls. And we found many of those people had voted. In one state in particular well over a thousand voted. Yeah, I think this was a move to import voters.”

Asked in an April 1 interview about those DOGE findings, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds said, “My reaction is the disgust that every American has because we knew that what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the left were doing in the darkness of night was shoving illegal immigrants into every role possible, whether it be entitlements or voting rolls across the country. Now, we have the proof.”

The DOGE findings were also cited by Republican Rep. Aaron Bean in support of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, a bill aimed at preventing voting by noncitizens. (Opponents of the legislation, including voting rights advocate groups, say it could prevent voter registration by U.S. citizens by instituting hurdles.)

On the floor of the House, Bean said: “We are here because this previous administration, the Biden administration, imported 10 to 15 million illegal aliens who have come here and we have evidence that they are participating in our elections. … It ends today when we vote on the SAVE Act.”

The bill passed the House on April 10 mostly along party lines, 220-208.

Experts Dubious

Voting experts, however, say the DOGE findings likely aren’t the smoking gun Musk and Gracias make it out to be.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said what Musk and Gracias cited “isn’t evidence, it’s garden-variety conspiracy theory, and a very old and overplayed one at that.”

“It is possible that a handful of noncitizens have been mistakenly registered to vote – and by a handful, I really mean tiny numbers,” Levitt said. “I don’t know what records DOGE is referring to when they say they ‘took a sample’ of noncitizen immigrants and looked at voter registration records to see if they had registered and voted, but every time I’ve seen claims like this with any specificity, the results vanish into smoke when people actually look at the results: either it’s bad data, or bad matching, or bad assumptions, or all three. But it’s impossible to really evaluate at this level of specificity, which they know full well.”

Indeed, states that have looked into noncitizens voting or registering to vote have found the issue to be relatively rare. 

• In March, the Iowa Secretary of State announced that an audit had found 277 noncitizens had registered to vote in the state. And 35 of those noncitizens cast ballots that were counted in the 2024 election; five such ballots were rejected.

• In May 2024, the Ohio Secretary of State announced it had found 137 people on the state’s voter registration rolls who had twice confirmed their noncitizenship status to the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. The press release did not indicate how many, if any, had tried to actually vote. But a grand jury indicted six people who legally and permanently immigrated to the U.S. for voting illegally as noncitizens between 2008 and 2020.

• In 2022, Georgia conducted a citizenship review of state voter rolls and found that 1,634 people had attempted to register to vote between 1997 and 2022 and could not be verified as citizens by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. None, however, voted. In October, the Associated Press reported that Georgia election officials said 20 out of the 8.2 million on the state’s voter registration rolls were not U.S. citizens, and that nine had voted in previous elections.

• In 2021, the Nevada Republican Party filed a complaint alleging that as many as 3,987 noncitizens had voted in the 2020 election. The allegation was based on people who presented an immigration document while obtaining a driver’s license over the previous five years. But a 13-page report issued by the Nevada Secretary of State concluded the allegation failed to account for a large number of noncitizens who were naturalized — and therefore became legal voters — in the time between obtaining their driver’s license and the election. “Without specific evidence to establish that identified individuals were foreign nationals when they voted in the November 3 election, there is nothing further that can be investigated,” the report stated. “In summary, the generalized information acquired from DMV cannot serve as a basis for an investigation into alleged voter fraud.”

“Multiple credible sources have documented that there is no evidence that unauthorized immigrants, green-card holders, or immigrants on temporary visas have registered and voted in U.S. federal elections in significant numbers,” Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. “Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal in all states and, since 1996, has criminal penalties” that can include federal incarceration for even registering to vote, he said.

“There have been a small number of people who have wrongfully registered to vote, often by mistake, and far fewer actually casting ballots,” Ruiz Soto said, adding that “clearly more can be done to reduce the likelihood of immigrants erroneously registering to vote.” But, he said, “this is not a problem of millions of immigrants, and the scale is often blown out of proportion by critics. Musk’s and Gracias’ remarks oversimplify the process of migrants obtaining temporary status and work authorization, and they promote the inaccurate idea that most recent migrants would vote for the Democratic Party even if they were to lawfully become U.S. citizens in the future.”

A Brennan Center for Justice review found that of the 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 general election in 42 jurisdictions in 12 states, there were “only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting” that were referred for further investigation or prosecution. “The absence of fraud reinforces a wide consensus among scholars, journalists and election administrators: voter fraud of any kind, including noncitizen voting, is rare.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed a database of fraud cases compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and found “only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023,” the BPC said in a 2024 post on this issue. “Illegal voting, including by noncitizens, is routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

Many states’ voter registration rolls do not even include Social Security numbers, and so matches in those cases — which would involve matching based on data such as names, addresses, birthdates or driver’s license numbers — can result in bad matches, experts said.

Experts: Risks Outweigh Rewards

The idea that large numbers of noncitizens are voting illegally is also highly dubious, experts told us, given the consequences faced by those immigrants for the payoff of a single vote.

Although it has long been illegal for noncitizens to vote, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 added some teeth to the prohibition against noncitizens registering to vote or voting in national elections. Violation can result in fines, up to a year in prison, deportation and revocation of legal status.

“Ockham’s razor says that noncitizens aren’t intentionally registering or voting, because it’s just not worth it,” Levitt told us, referring to the theory that the simplest explanation is usually the best. The conspiracy theory Musk and Gracias have “laid out for registering nets a noncitizen exactly one incremental vote. And in exchange, they’ve created a permanent paper record of a federal and state crime that’s an absolutely standard part of any record check for any change in immigration status, subjected themselves to deportation,” fines and potential prison time “and ensured that they’ll never get citizenship. The reason you don’t see actual evidence of noncitizen voting in any volume is that it doesn’t make any sense for any noncitizen to commit the crime.”

Olson, of the Cato Institute, said that while “Elon Musk has been spreading unverified and unverifiable claims about illegal voting by noncitizens for a year or more. … The actual political trends of recent years have been exactly the opposite of what Musk claims. As the share of foreign born persons resident in the U.S. has risen in recent years, the Republican share of the vote has risen, not fallen. Some of this is because new citizens who achieve naturalization have shifted in their voting propensity toward Republicans. But mostly it is because, by overwhelming majorities, those who lack citizenship neither attempt to vote nor succeed in voting.”

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Source: FactCheck