Media Claims That Noncitizen Voting Is 'Rare' Are Unsupportable Because the Detection System Is Designed Not to Find It
Source: Katharine Gorka. "Media Lies About 'Rare' Noncitizen Voting Are Bull Hockey." September 4, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that when journalists say noncitizen voting is 'rare,' they're citing bad evidence, because the system barely looks for it and almost never prosecutes it even when it's found. She uses Fairfax County, Virginia as her main example: officials found and referred hundreds of suspected noncitizen voters to prosecutors, nobody was ever charged, and then the county gave up looking — meaning those cases will never show up in the statistics that supposedly prove fraud is rare.
Conclusion
The media's characterization of noncitizen voting as 'rare' or 'infinitesimally rare' is a misleading and unsupportable claim, because the statistics used to support it measure prosecutions rather than actual incidence, and the system for detecting such fraud is structured in a way that it rarely finds or prosecutes cases in the first place.
Premises
- Fraud statistics cited by media and academics (e.g., Heritage Foundation's database) count only cases that resulted in prosecution or conviction, not actual instances of fraud, making them measures of prosecutorial activity rather than incidence.
- States including Virginia do not systematically verify citizenship at voter registration, and federal law prohibits requiring documentary proof of citizenship on the federal registration form.
- In Fairfax County, Virginia, hundreds of individuals were referred to prosecutors as potential noncitizen voters over roughly 17 months, yet zero prosecutions resulted, after which the county abandoned its referral policy citing burden and evidentiary standards.
- Because none of the Fairfax County referrals were prosecuted, none of those cases will ever appear in databases or academic tallies used to claim noncitizen voting is rare, creating a circular problem where non-detection is cited as evidence of non-occurrence.
- Similar patterns of detected-but-unprosecuted or unresolved noncitizen registration/voting cases have been found in Ohio, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and North Carolina, suggesting Fairfax is not an isolated case.
- Even if noncitizen voting were numerically rare, rarity is irrelevant to electoral outcomes when many races are decided by small margins (e.g., a few hundred votes or a tie broken by drawing lots).
- Election law does not generally treat rare instances of fraud (e.g., ballot-box stuffing) as acceptable simply because they are statistically infrequent, so applying a 'rare therefore irrelevant' standard specifically to noncitizen voting is inconsistent.
Assumptions
- The referral and cancellation numbers cited from various states represent genuine potential instances of noncitizen registration/voting rather than largely being administrative errors, naturalized citizens, or false positives.
- The primary reason fraud goes undetected is systemic design/reluctance rather than because the actual underlying rate is genuinely very low.
- Media outlets using terms like 'rare' are relying primarily on prosecution-based statistics (like the Heritage database) rather than other forms of evidence or estimation.
- A lack of prosecution reflects failure to pursue known cases rather than legitimate application of proof standards（i.e., that many referred cases would have held up as fraud if pursued).
- The disenfranchisement framing (one fraudulent vote cancels one legitimate vote) is an appropriate way to characterize the harm of noncitizen voting for argumentative purposes.