Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that a recent state audit of voter rolls found only 20 noncitizens out of 8.2 million registered voters, a minuscule percentage that invalidates Donald Trump's conspiracy theory about widespread noncitizen voting.
Using county, state and federal records, the audit found that only 20 people on Georgia voter rolls were determined to be noncitizens, Raffensperger said at a news conference on Wednesday — or about one in every 400,000 registered voters. The voter registrations of those 20 people have been canceled and Raffensperger's office has referred them to their local county prosecutors.
Of the 20 noncitizens who had registered to vote, only nine have ever cast a vote. The other 11 have no record of voting, he said. There are an additional 156 people whose citizenship status will require human investigation, Raffensperger added, and his office has opened case files into them.
Raffensperger has sparred with Trump in the past over his voter fraud claims, including on an infamous phone call on Jan. 2, 2021 in which Trump pressed the Republican elected official to overturn his loss in Georgia.
The findings of the state audit are further proof that there is no basis for Trump's claims about noncitizen voting, which he has parroted as he primes his supporters to reject his potential election defeat. Trump and his allies have also pre-emptively blamed Democrats for voter fraud, pushing the baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats are allowing undocumented immigrants into the country in exchange for votes.
Yet election officials across the country have repeatedly denied that noncitizen voting, which is excessively rare and already illegal, is a real issue.
“There is no proof that there is this overwhelming number of noncitizens on the rolls,” Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in Raffensperger’s office, told reporters on Wednesday. “Because the reality is, if you’re a noncitizen and you’re a legal resident and you’re on a path to citizenship, if you try to register to vote, you will never get to be a citizen. It is a very high risk, very little reward for one vote thing.”
Sterling also pushed back on U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's attempt to sow doubt about the security of voting machines. Over the weekend, Greene amplified a social media post claiming that a voting machine was repeatedly "changing" the selections of a voter in Whitfield County from Republican candidates to Democrat ones.
“That’s extremely concerning,” she told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an interview. “It sounds similar to what we heard in 2020.”
Sterling said that there was "zero evidence" of a voting machine flipping votes. The incident in question, he said, involved an elderly voter "who went to the poll manager and said, 'This isn't who I meant to vote for,'" and then repeated the process with the help of a poll worker.
"There's going to be 190 million people interfacing with the system they deal with once every two to four years, with tens of — hundreds of thousands of volunteer-level human beings," he said. "There are going to be errors. What we can't allow people to do is undermine people's faith in the outcome of the election because of natural human frailty."