State and Federal Law Ensures Only Citizens Can Vote in U.S. Elections

A rigorous set of checks and balances exist in every state to ensure that only U.S. citizens can vote in federal and statewide elections. Despite these robust and longstanding checks and balances enumerated in state and federal law, and put into practice by election officials nationwide, some are currently perpetuating false claims of noncitizen voting as a pretext to challenge election results and diminish trust in our systems. 

This fact sheet describes the current systems that ensure only U.S. citizens vote in U.S. elections – and why people look to American elections as models of freedom, fairness, and checks and balances. 

Only U.S. citizens can legally vote in federal and statewide elections. This law is enforced through a rigorous set of checks and balances.

When Checks Occur

✅ At the point of registration. Each potential voter’s citizenship is verified during the voter registration process.

✅ Through ongoing voter registration list maintenance. Election officials in every state regularly comb through their voter registration lists, and using data from a variety of sources, ensure every voter is an eligible U.S. citizen.

✅ When casting a ballot. Election officials verify the identity of each voter who casts their ballot to ensure they are on the voter registration list – and therefore an eligible U.S. citizen.

✅ When ballots are counted. When election officials canvass and count the ballots, and when they audit and certify the election results, additional rigorous checks ensure that the ballots are cast by eligible citizens – and that they are counted as those citizens intended.

Ensuring Voter Registration Lists Contain Only U.S. Citizens

Election officials ensure that voters are U.S. citizens when they register to vote and regularly comb through their voter registration lists to make sure every person on the list is an eligible U.S. citizen. 

Voter registration forms require each potential voter to swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are a U.S. citizen who is eligible to vote. ¹ It is a felony offense for a noncitizen to falsely claim to be a citizen on a voter registration form – punishable by prison time, a hefty fine, and deportation.

Election officials in every state regularly work to ensure voter rolls are accurate, up-to-date, and include only eligible U.S. citizens. State and local election officials consult specific data sources to determine whether voters are ineligible for reasons such as death, felony conviction, change of address, or lack of U.S. citizenship. Some of the data sources that often contain citizenship information include:

• Jury Summonses: In many states – including Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, and Texas – election officials are notified when any resident summoned for jury duty responds by indicating they are not a U.S. citizen. 

• DMV Data: Although DMV data is not designed to capture the citizenship of every driver, the DMV does often have useful citizenship information for some drivers. Many states – including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas – make use of this data by ensuring that there are no people on the voter registration list who recently used a form of residency documentation at the DMV that indicates noncitizenship (such a resident alien card).²

Ensuring the Voter Casting a Ballot is a Citizen on the List

The checks listed above ensure that the voter registration list only contains U.S. citizens. Checks during the voting process ensure that a voter casting a ballot is in fact on the voter registration list – and therefore an eligible U.S. citizen.

Eligibility Confirmation for In-Person Voting. Voters who choose to vote in person, whether early or on Election Day, must check-in at their polling place to ensure they are on the voter registration list. Election officials verify the identity of voters in a number of ways, including:

• Showing an ID, such as drivers license, passport, or a military, tribal, or student ID;
• Showing proof of residency, such as a utility bill, bank statement, or paycheck;
• Attesting to their identify under penalty of perjury;
• Signature matching; and/or
• Providing identifying information (e.g. SSN, date of birth, mother’s maiden name).

Eligibility Confirmation for Mail Voting. Election officials also verify the identity of voters when they cast (and even when they apply for) a ballot by mail. States laws vary, but each state requires election officials to compare information provided by the voter with their ballot with information in the voter’s file. Verification methods include:

• Signature Matching: In most states – including Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, and Ohio – election officials compare the voter’s signature on their ballot return envelope with the signature in the voter’s registration record.
• Identification Numbers: In other states – such as Georgia and Texas – election officials compare the ID number (driver’s license or SSN) that a voter provides on their ballot return envelope with the ID number in the voter’s registration record.
• Notary/Witness: In a few states – including North Carolina – a notary or two witnesses must sign the ballot envelope. In North Carolina (which has the strictest mail ballot verification laws in the country), voters must also include a copy of ID with their ballot.

Ensuring Lawful Ballots are Counted as Citizens Intended

The sections above detail how numerous checks ensure that only citizens are on voter registration lists, and additional checks during the voting process ensure that each voter casting a ballot is in fact on the registration list, and therefore a confirmed citizen. 

Following those casting of the ballots, there are additional rigorous checks and balances throughout the ballot counting and canvassing processes, as well as during the auditing and certifying of election results. Impartial election workers, as well as teams of people from both parties, work together at every step of the process to ensure that ballots were cast by eligible citizens – and are counted accurately according to the intentions of those citizens.

For more detail on this part of the process, see our detailed analysis of these checks and balances across 12 key states. Some of these safeguards include:

• Verification of ballots prior to their being counted;
• Rigorous testing of ballot counting machines before and after each election; and
• Audits and other measures to confirm the accuracy of results, conducted by impartial election workers.

Conclusion

Taken together, this rigorous and comprehensive system of checks and balances is one the reasons American elections serve as a model for the world. It has proven as more than sufficient to ensure that only eligible U.S. citizens are able to vote in U.S. elections. In fact, a study from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, found just 23 cases of noncitizen voting in federal elections out of more than 1.2 billion ballots cast in the last 20 years.

---

1.  This is true in each of the 49 states that require voter registration in order to vote. In each state, each person who applies to register to vote must  attest to their voting eligibility – including citizenship –  under penalty of perjury. North Dakota is the only state that does not require citizens to register prior to voting. North Dakota  voters must prove their eligibility when they vote. ↩︎
2. When using DMV data, it is critical that the data be recent. The use of outdated DMV data has led to the incorrect identification of eligible U.S. citizens for removal. For example, in 2019, Texas sent letters to tens of thousands of naturalized citizens, threatening to remove them from the voter registration list based on outdated DMV records. At the time there were no safeguards in Texas law, so voters who were not citizens at the time of their interaction with the DMV – but who later became naturalized citizens – were targeted for removal. Texas has since changed its law to ensure that voters are only identified for removal if the DMV data is from an interaction that occurred after they registered to vote. ↩︎