Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157

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Electoral Studies
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud

Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?
Jesse T. Richman a, *, Gulshan A. Chattha b, c, 1, David C. Earnest b
a
b
c

Department of Political Science, Old Dominion University, BAL 7000, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA
Old Dominion University, USA
George Mason University, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 24 January 2014
Received in revised form 12 August 2014
Accepted 3 September 2014
Available online 21 September 2014

In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the
frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections.
Although such participation is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United
States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of
voter registration. This study examines participation rates by non-citizens using a na­
tionally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants. We ﬁnd that some
non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough
to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congres­
sional elections. Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote
needed to overcome ﬁlibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama
administration priorities in the 111th Congress.
© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Non-citizen
Voting
Immigrant
Enfranchisement
Vote fraud
Registration

1. Introduction
This analysis provides some of the ﬁrst available
nationwide estimates of the portion of non-citizen immi­
grants who vote in U.S. elections. These estimates speak to
an ongoing debate concerning non-citizen voting rights
within the United States (DeSipio 2011; Earnest, 2008;
FAIR, 2004; Fund and von Spakovsky, 2012; Hayduk,
2006; Immigration Policy Center, 2012; Munro, 2008;
Song, 2009; Von Spakovsky, 2012) and they also speak to
broader global questions concerning the normative politi­
cal place of non-citizens in democratic politics.
Most state and local governments in the United States
bar non-citizens from participating in elections (the
exception: a few localities in Maryland), but the question of
whether non-citizen immigrants can, and should, partici­
pate receives varied answers globally (Earnest, 2008) with

*  Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 757 683 3853.
E-mail addresses: jesse.travis.richman@gmail.com, jrichman@odu.edu
(J.T. Richman), gchat001@odu.edu (G.A. Chattha), dearnest@odu.edu (D.C.
Earnest).
1
Tel.: þ1 757 331 0359.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2014.09.001
0261-3794/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

many countries offering at least some opportunity for some
resident non-citizens to participate in local elections, and
some countries offering full participation in national
elections.
The United States also has a long history of noncitizen
voting at the local, state and national levels. Aylsworth
(1931) notes that “during the nineteenth century, the
laws and constitutions of at least twenty-two states and
territories granted aliens the right to vote.” From the
founding of the Republic to the early 20th century, various
territories and states enfranchised noncitizen residents for
several reasons. During westward expansion, several ter­
ritories offered the franchise to entice European migrants
to settle so that territories would meet the population
criterion for admission to the Union. Similarly, during
Reconstruction several southern states offered the fran­
chise to migrants who would replace slave labor. Later,
some states enfranchised so-called “declarant aliens”
(resident aliens who declared their intent to naturalize) to
educate them about the interests and issues of their
communities. Yet the practice of enfranchising noncitizens
served less salutary goals as well. By enfranchising only
propertied white European men, the practice of noncitizen

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J.T. Richman et al. / Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157

voting reinforced extant prohibitions on voting by women,
African Americans, Asian Americans, the poor and others.
By the 1920s, however, following the large migrations of
the early 20th century, all states had revoked the voting
rights of noncitizens (Earnest, 2008, 25e26). Non-citizens
voted legally in every presidential election through 1924.
By 1928 the last state constitution that protected noncitizen voting (Arkansas') had been amended.
The decision to (dis) enfranchise non-citizens falls
within the states' authority to deﬁne qualiﬁcations for
voting. The nineteenth-century practices in various states
produced a case-law legacy that most legal scholars
conclude permits states to enfranchise noncitizens if leg­
islators so choose. Similarly, on several occasions the Su­
preme Court has upheld the constitutionality of noncitizen
voting because states have the authority to set voter qual­
iﬁcations (Earnest, 2008, 25e26). The question of noncit­
izen voting is, in the end, a political rather than a legal one.
Within the context of the current nearly universal ban
on non-citizen voting in the United States, this study ex­
amines the voting behavior of non-citizens. To what extent
do non-citizens ignore legal barriers and seize ballot access
in U.S. elections? We ﬁnd that non-citizen participation in
U.S. elections is low, but non-zero, with an unusual set of
covariates with participation, and the potential to change
important election outcomes.
2. Data
The data used for this paper is from the 2008 and 2010
Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, based on the
ﬁles released by Stephen Ansolabehere (2010, 2011). The
2008 and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies
(CCES) were conducted by YouGov/Polimetrix of Palo Alto,
CA as an internet-based survey using a sample selected to
mirror the demographic characteristics of the U.S. popula­
tion. In both years survey data was collected in two waves:
pre-election in October, and then post-election in
November. The questionnaire asked more than 100 ques­
tions regarding electoral participation, issue preferences,
and candidate choices.
Four design characteristics make this survey uniquely
valuable for our purposes. 1. It has an enormous sample
size, which makes feasible sub-population analyses
(n ¼ 32,800 in 2008 and n ¼ 55,400 in 2010). 2. It included a
question about citizenship status. 3. Many non-citizens
were asked if they voted, unlike other large surveys
which ﬁlter out non-citizens before asking about voting. 4.
Participation and registration were veriﬁed for at least
some residents in nearly every state for the 2008 survey
(Virginia state law barred voting veriﬁcation).
Inclusion of a validated voting measure is particularly
valuable in this context because of important and contra­
dictory social and legal incentives for reporting non-citizen
electoral participation. Although variation in the social
desirability of voting may skew estimates (Ansolabehere
and Hersh, 2012) as for other populations, legal concerns
may lead some non-citizens to deny that they are regis­
tered and/or have voted when in fact they have done both.
Validation of registration and voting was performed by the
CCES research team in collaboration with the ﬁrm Catalyst.

Of 339 non-citizens identiﬁed in the 2008 survey, Catalyst
matched 140 to a commercial (e.g. credit card) and/or voter
database. The vote validation procedures are described in
detail by Ansolabehere and Hersh (2012). The veriﬁcation
effort means that for a bit more than 40 percent of the 2008
sample, we are able to verify whether non-citizens voted
when they said they did, or didn't vote when they said they
didn't. For the remaining non-citizens, we have only the
respondent's word to go on concerning electoral partici­
pation, although we do attempt to make inferences about
their true participation rate based upon the veriﬁed portion
of the sample.
About one percent of the respondents in each survey
identiﬁed themselves as non-citizen immigrants (339 in
2008, 489 in 2010)2.In both years the sample likely includes
individuals drawn from more than one category of noncitizen (ranging from permanent resident aliens to those
on short-term student visas). In the context of the 2010
CCES, it is possible to identify the exact citizenship status of
some respondents because many provided an open-ended
response about their citizenship status when asked why
they did not vote. For instance, “I'm a permanent resident,”
“I have a green card,” “waiting on US Citizenship to come
through!” and most commonly simply, “not a citizen.” No
individual speciﬁcally identiﬁed themselves as an illegal or
undocumented resident, although one did indicate that he
or she hadn't voted because the individual “didn't have
green card [sic] yet.” It is possible that some respondents
were without any documentation whatsoever (popularly
called “illegal aliens”), though this cannot be conﬁrmed or
rejected with the information available as no respondent
speciﬁcally self-identiﬁed themselves as illegal or undoc­
umented (but many did not speciﬁcally identify themselves
as having permanent resident status).
A critical question for this project is whether re­
spondents' self-identiﬁcation as non-citizens was accurate.
If most or all of the “non-citizens” who indicated that they
voted were in fact citizens who accidentally misstated their
citizenship status, then the data would have nothing to
contribute concerning the frequency of non-citizen voting.
Appendix 1 includes demographic, attitudinal, and
geographical analyses designed to assess whether those
who stated that they were non-citizens were in fact noncitizens. It builds a strong construct or concurrent validity
case for the validity of the measure. We demonstrate that
self-reported non-citizens who voted had similar racial,
geographic, and attitudinal characteristics with noncitizens who did not vote, and that as a whole the noncitizens in our sample had racial, attitudinal, and
geographic characteristics consistent with their reported
non-citizen status. Given this evidence, we think that the
vast majority of those who said they were non-citizens
were in fact non-citizens.

2
Since the total legal permanent resident population in 2008 of 12.6
million (Rytina, 2012) was approximately four percent of the overall U.S.
population, and the total non-citizen adult population in 2011 was 19.4
million (CPS, 2011), the non-citizen population was under-sampled.
Nonetheless, the sample that was collected provides the ﬁrst nation­
wide sample from which analysts can draw inferences concerning elec­
toral participation by non-citizens in United States elections.

 J.T. Richman et al. / Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157

For 2008, the median length of residence at the current
address for non-citizens was 1e2 years, with 16.9 percent
residing at the current address for less than seven months,
and 25.7 percent residing at the current address for 5 or
more years. This is considerably more mobile than the
overall sample, which has a median length of residence of
over 5 years (57.1 percent). In 2010 the median time spent
at the current address by non-citizens was 3 years, and
respondents were also asked how many years they had
lived in their current city with a median response of 5
years. A few respondents have been in the U.S. for a long
time. One 2010 respondent explained “I am English
although I've lived here for 26 years and am balking at
becoming a citizen for multiple reasons although I know I
really need to do this for my family's ﬁnancial future. So I
am active in politics and know more than most Americans.”
It is impossible to tell for certain whether the noncitizens who responded to the survey were representative
of the broader population of non-citizens, but some clues
can be gained by examining education levels. Census bu­
reau estimates (Census, 2012) suggest that the sample
contains slightly more college-educated respondents (30.6
percent) than the overall foreign born population (26.8
percent), and many fewer respondents with less than a
high-school education (8.3 percent versus 33.3 percent).
The paucity of uneducated non-citizens in the sample
would in most circumstances be expected to bias sample
voting participation upward. However, given our results
concerning the association between participation and ed­
ucation (discussed below) it may well be that the paucity of
uneducated non-citizens in the CCES sample biases the
turnout estimates down rather than up. We confront this
issue primarily by weighting the data.
Throughout the analysis (with the exception of the ap­
pendix) we report results produced from weighted data.
Weight construction began with CCES case weights, but
then adjusted these by race to match the racial de­
mographic of the non-citizen population. Our concern with
using regular CPS case-weights was that weights were
constructed based upon overall demographic characteris­
tics without attention to the demographic character of the
non-citizen population. For instance, the Census Bureau
estimates (Census Bureau, 2013) that 6.7 percent of noncitizens are Black3. The unweighted 2008 CPS dataset
slightly over-counts non-citizen respondents who identi­
ﬁed their race as “Black” at 9.1 percent. The weighted 2008
CPS by contrast dramatically over-counts non-citizen re­
spondents who self-identiﬁed their race as “Black” at 14.1
percent. We constructed a new weight variable that
adjusted the CCES case weight to (1) preserve the actual
number of respondents in the sample in the face of a ten­
dency for non-citizens to be in demographic groups
receiving higher weights, and (2) match Census Bureau
(CPS, 2011) estimates of the racial characteristics of the
non-citizen population. Results for weighted data were
qualitatively similar to (but somewhat lower than) results

3
Here we combine the categories Black or African American, Black or
African American and White, or Black or African American and Native
American e 6.6 percent were Black or African American alone.

151

with un-weighted data for the key voting variables.
Weighting produces a non-citizen sample that appears to
be a better match with Census estimates of the population.
For instance, 32.5 percent of the weighted sample had no
high school degree.
3. Participatory stages
Participation in U.S. elections requires that would-be
voters complete a series of steps including: registering to
vote, traveling to a polling place or requesting an absentee
ballot and presenting any required identiﬁcation, and
casting a ballot. At each stage, legal barriers to non-citizen
voting may lead to lower participation. Only if all stages are
surmounted will the non-citizen cast a ballot in a U.S.
election. At any stage, concern about the potentially high
legal costs of non-citizen voting, or enforcement of ofﬁcial
requirements for ballot access may prevent non-citizen
voting.
3.1. Registration
Non-citizen voter registration is a violation of election
law in almost all U.S. jurisdictions, the lone exceptions are
for residents of a few localities in Maryland. Most noncitizens did not cross the initial threshold of voter regis­
tration, but some did. In 2008, 67 non-citizens (19.8%)
either claimed they were registered, had their registration
status veriﬁed, or both. Among the 337 immigrant noncitizens who responded to the CCES, 50 (14.8%) indicated
in the survey that they were registered. An additional 17
non-citizens had their voter registration status veriﬁed
through record matches even though they claimed not to
be registered. Perhaps the legal risks of non-citizen regis­
tration led some of these individuals to claim not to be
registered. In 2010 76 (15.6%) of non-citizens indicated that
they were registered to vote in either the pre-election or
post-election survey waves.
In 2008, the proportion of non-citizens who were in fact
registered to vote was somewhere between 19.8% (all who
reported or had veriﬁed registration, or both) and 3.3% (11
non-citizen respondents were almost certainly registered
to vote because they both stated that they were registered
and had their registration status veriﬁed). Even the lowend estimate suggests a fairly substantial population of
registered-to-vote non-citizens nationwide. Out of roughly
19.4 million adult non-citizens in the United States, this
would represent a population of roughly 620,000 regis­
tered non-citizens4. By way of comparison, there are
roughly 725,000 individuals in the average Congressional
district.
The “adjusted estimate” row presents our best guess at
the true percentage of non-citizens registered. It uses the
94 (weighted) non-citizens from 2008 for whom Catalyst
obtained a match to commercial and/or voter databases to
estimate the portion of non-citizens who either claim to be
registered when they are not (35%) or claim not to be

4
The Census Bureau (CPS, 2011) estimates that there were 19.4 million
non-citizens age 18 or over living in the United States in 2011.

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J.T. Richman et al. / Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157

Table 1
Estimated voter registration by non-citizens.

Self reported and/or veriﬁed
Self reported and veriﬁed
Adjusted estimate

70%

2008

2010

60%

67 (19.8%)
11 (3.3%)
84 (25.1%)

76 (15.6%)
N.A.
124 (25.3%)

50%

67%

40%
26%

30%

registered when they are (18%). We then use these numbers
to extrapolate for the entire sample of non-citizens in 2008
and 2010. Because most non-citizens who said they were
registered were in fact registered, and quite a few who said
they were not were actually registered, the adjusted estimate is the highest of the three estimates, indicating that
roughly one quarter of non-citizens were likely registered
to vote (Table 1).
3.2. Voter identiﬁcation
Post-registration, another barrier to voting by noncitizens might come in the form of the credential
checking that occurs before individuals are permitted to
vote on Election Day. In 2008 14 respondents indicated
that they did not vote because “I did not have the correct
form of identiﬁcation,” and in 2010 29 indicated that they
did not vote because of the absence of necessary
identiﬁcation.
Nonetheless, identiﬁcation requirements blocked
ballot access for only a small portion of non-citizens. Of
the 27 non-citizens who indicated that they were “asked
to show picture identiﬁcation, such as a driver's license,
at the polling place or election ofﬁce,” in the 2008 survey,
18 claimed to have subsequently voted, and one more
indicated that they were “allowed to vote using a provisional ballot.” Only 7 (25.9%) indicated that they were
not allowed to vote after showing identiﬁcation. These
results are summarized in Fig. 1. Although the proportion
of non-citizens prevented from voting by ID requirements is statistically distinguishable from the
portion of citizens5 (Chi-Square ¼ 161, p < .001), the
overall message is that identiﬁcation requirements do
not prevent the majority of non-citizen voting. The fact
that most non-citizen immigrants who showed identiﬁcation were subsequently permitted to vote suggests that
efforts to use photo-identiﬁcation to prevent non-citizen
voting are unlikely to be particularly effective. This most
likely reﬂects the impact of state laws that permit noncitizens to obtain state identiﬁcation cards (e.g. driver's
licenses).
3.3. Voting
There is evidence that some non-citizen immigrants
voted in both 2008 and 2010. In 2008, thirty eight (11.3%)
reported that they voted, had their vote veriﬁed, or both.
As with registration, claims of voting and validated

5

0.6 percent of all survey respondents were prevented from voting
after showing identiﬁcation.

20%
10%

4%

0%
Voted

Provisional Ballot Could Not Vote

Fig. 1. Outcome of polling-place photo-identiﬁcation request among noncitizens.

voting did not intersect very often, in part because the
voting question was not asked for all non-citizens who
had veriﬁed voting, and voter ﬁle matches were not
available for all non-citizens who claimed that they
voted. Twenty seven indicated that “I deﬁnitely voted in
the November General Election” and 16 had validated
general election votes. Only ﬁve (1.5%) both claimed that
they deﬁnitely voted and had a validated vote. In 2010
thirteen non-citizens (3.5% of respondents to the postelection survey) indicated that they voted. All 2008 and
2010 reported votes by non-citizens were in violation of
state election law as no votes were cast by non-citizen
respondents from the Maryland localities which allow
non-citizen voting (Table 2).
How many non-citizen votes were likely cast in 2008?
Taking the most conservative estimate e those who both
said they voted and cast a veriﬁed vote e yields a conﬁdence interval based on sampling error between 0.2%
and 2.8% for the portion of non-citizens participating in
elections. Taking the least conservative measure e at
least one indicator showed that the respondent voted e
yields an estimate that between 7.9% and 14.7% percent
of non-citizens voted in 2008. Since the adult noncitizen population of the United States was roughly
19.4 million (CPS, 2011), the number of non-citizen
voters (including both uncertainty based on normally
distributed sampling error, and the various combinations
of veriﬁed and reported voting) could range from just
over 38,000 at the very minimum to nearly 2.8 million at
the maximum.
The “adjusted estimate” represents our best guess at the
portion of non-citizens who voted. As with voter registration, we extrapolate from the behavior of validated voters
in 2008 to estimate the portion of non-citizens who said

Table 2
Estimated voter turnout by non-citizens.

Self reported and/or veriﬁed
Self reported and veriﬁed
Adjusted estimate

2008

2010

38 (11.3%)
5 (1.5%)
21 (6.4%)

13 (3.5%)
N.A.
8 (2.2%)

 153

J.T. Richman et al. / Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157

they voted but didn't, and the portion who said they didn't
vote but did. 71 non-citizens answered a survey question
indicating whether they voted, and also had their vote
validated. Among these, 56 indicated that they did not vote
(but two of these cast a validated vote), while 13 indicated
they voted, of whom ﬁve cast a validated vote6. The
adjusted estimate of 6.4 percent for 2008 is quite substantial, and would be associated with 1.2 million noncitizen votes cast in 2008 if the weighted CCES sample is
fully representative of the non-citizen population. To produce an adjusted ﬁgure for 2010 we cut by three quarters
the estimated number of non-citizens who voted but
claimed they did not (somewhat larger than the drop in the
number who self-reported voting). This produces an overall
estimate that 2.2 percent voted in 2010.
There has been signiﬁcant debate in the literature
concerning the ideological or political leanings of noncitizen voters. In Belgium for instance, Jacobs (2001)
found indications that non-citizens often voted for right
wing parties, while others (Bird et al., 2010; Howard,
2009; Janoski, 2010; Joppke, 2003; Rath, 1990) ﬁnd evidence that left-leaning parties and noncitizens tend to
align together. In the 2008 and 2010 U.S. elections, noncitizen voters favored Democratic candidates. Noncitizens who reported voting were asked their candidate preferences, and these preferences skewed toward
Democrats. In 2008 66.7 percent reported voting for the
Democratic House candidate, while only 20.8 percent
reported voting for the Republican candidate. 81.8
percent reported voting for Barack Obama compared to
17.5 percent for John McCain. The difference of proportions is statistically signiﬁcant using both Chi-Square
and z tests (p < .005) and substantively large for both
the House and Presidential vote cases. Similarly in 2010,
53.8 percent of non-citizens reported voting for the
Democratic House candidate while 30.7 percent indicated that they voted for the Republican. These results
are summarized in Fig. 2.
These results allow us to estimate the impact of noncitizen voting on election outcomes. We ﬁnd that there is
reason to believe non-citizen voting changed one state's
Electoral College votes in 2008, delivering North Carolina
to Obama, and that non-citizen votes have also led to
Democratic victories in congressional races including a
critical 2008 Senate race that delivered for Democrats a
60-vote ﬁlibuster-proof majority in the Senate. It is
possible to evaluate whether non-citizen votes have
changed election outcomes by pairing data on the
number of adult non-citizens per state with election
margins and our estimates of the frequency with which
non-citizens supported Republican and Democratic candidates. For instance each additional non-citizen vote
adds an expected 0.643 votes to Obama's vote margin

6
This should produce a very conservative measure of the portion who
actually voted, as most of the drop off is among individuals for whom
registration status could not be veriﬁed (and this could be a result of
errors in matching e a match to consumer data could occur even though
a match to voter data has been missed). Among non-citizens with veriﬁed
registration status, 75 percent of those who reported voting had a veriﬁed
vote, while 30 percent who reported not voting cast a validated vote.

90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
PresidenƟal Vote 2008

House Vote 2008
Democrat

House Vote 2010

Republican

Fig. 2. Partisan vote choice by non-citizens in 2008 and 2010 U.S. elections.

based on the portion of non-citizens who supported
Obama and McCain. By multiplying this decimal by the
victory margin for Obama (Federal Election Commission,
2009) and then dividing by the number of adult noncitizens in the state (Census Bureau, 2013), we can
determine the level of non-citizen voter turnout required
for non-citizen votes to have given Obama a state-level
victory, and assess whether such a turnout is plausible
in light of our turnout estimates.
There were ﬁve states in 2008 where less than 100
percent turnout among non-citizens could have accounted for Obama's victory margin. These states, and the
required turnout among non-citizens, are shown in Table
3. Virginia (85 percent turnout required) and Nevada (68
percent) are clearly not cases in which non-citizen votes
could have changed the outcome. Our estimates of noncitizen turnout are much lower. Similarly, the turnout
required for non-citizens to have made the difference in
Florida and Indiana (22 percent and 27 percent respectively) is larger than the upper bound of our turnout
estimate. By contrast, North Carolina is a plausible case. If
more than 5.1 percent of non-citizens residing in North
Carolina turned out to vote in 2008, then the vote margin
they gave Obama would have been sufﬁcient to provide
Obama with the entirety of his victory margin in the
state. Since our best estimate is that 6.4 percent of
non-citizens actually voted, it is likely though by no
means certain that John McCain would have won North
Carolina were it not for the votes for Obama cast by
non-citizens.
A similar analysis reveals that there was one House race
and one Senate race during the 2008 and 2010 election
cycles which were close enough for votes by non-citizens to
potentially account for the entirety of the Democratic victor's margin. As before this analysis merges Census estimates of the number of adult non-citizens by House district
and State with FEC tabulations of ﬁnal election results. In
2008 there were 22 House races and two Senate races in
which the Democratic candidate's winning margin was
small enough that less than 100 percent turnout among
non-citizens could account for Democratic victory, and in
2010 there were 24 such House districts and three Senate
races.7 In the two instances shown in Table 4 the required

7
Each analysis assumes that non-citizens voted for D and R candidates
at the relevant national percentages from that election year and for that
ofﬁce. E.g. 68 percent voted for House Democrats in 2010.

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J.T. Richman et al. / Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157

Table 3
Non-citizen turnout required to account for 2008 Obama win of state.
State

Obama victory
margin
(FEC, 2009)

Number of
adult
non-citizens
(Census
Bureau, 2013)

Non-citizen
turnout required
to account for
Obama victory
margin

North Carolina
Florida
Indiana
Nevada
Virginia

14,177
236,450
28,391
120,909
234,527

432,700
1,684,705
165,210
275,565
427,535

5.1%
21.8%
26.7%
68.2%
85.3%

turnout is small enough that it is quite likely non-citizen
participation led to victory by the Democratic candidate
e the necessary non-citizen turnout is within the range of
our turnout estimates. As with the presidential-election
results above, this analysis suggest that non-citizen
turnout is large enough to have had a modest, but real,
inﬂuence on election outcomes in the US.
The most important race identiﬁed in Table 4 is un­
doubtedly the Minnesota 2008 Senate contest. This race,
ultimately decided by 312 votes for Democrat Al Franken,
was of critical national importance. It gave Democrats the
ﬁlibuster-proof super-majority needed to pass major
legislative initiatives during President Obama's ﬁrst year
in ofﬁce. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,
for instance, would have had a much more difﬁcult path
to passage were it not for Franken's pivotal vote. The MN
2008 Senate race is also the race where the smallest
portion of non-citizen votes would have tipped the bal­
ance e participation by more than 0.65% of non-citizens
in MN is sufﬁcient to account for the entirety of Franken's
margin. Our best guess is that nearly ten times as many
voted.
4. Is non-citizen voting intentional or accidental?
The fact that non-citizen voting is illegal in most parts
of the United States means that those who voted were
potentially violating the law. The decision to participate
in spite of de-jure barriers may at times be an intentional
act of protest against the failure to enfranchise noncitizen residents. On the other hand, some may have
violated election laws accidentally because they were
unaware of legal barriers to electoral participation.
Education rates may provide some clues concerning
the balance between ignorance and activism. If activism

Table 4
Non-citizen turnout required to account for democratic congressional
victories.
State, district, 
and year 

Democratic
candidate
victory
margin (FEC)

MN Senate (2008) 312
VA 5 (2008)
727

Number of
adult non-citizens
(Census Bureau,
2013, 2014)

Non-citizen
turnout required
to account for
victory margin

180,020
19,845

0.65%
6.94%

drives non-citizen voting, then participation rates should
be higher among better educated individuals who are
more likely to be attentive to normative arguments in
favor of enfranchising non-citizen residents. If ignorance
of legal barriers drives voting, then participation rates
should be higher among those who are more poorly
educated.
Unlike other populations, including naturalized citizens,
(Bass and Casper, 2001; Mayer, 2011) education is not asso­
ciated with higher participation among non-citizens. In 2008,
non-citizens with less than a college degree were signiﬁcantly
more likely to cast a validated vote (Somers'd -0.17, p < .001),
and no non-citizens with a college degree or higher cast a
validated vote. Non-citizens with more education were also
not signiﬁcantly more likely to self-report voting in 2008 or
2010. This hints at a possible link between non-citizen voting
and lack of awareness about legal barriers.
5. Conclusions
Our exploration of non-citizen voting in the 2008 presi­
dential election found that most non-citizens did not reg­
ister or vote in 2008, but some did. The proportion of noncitizens who voted was less than ﬁfteen percent, but
signiﬁcantly greater than zero. Similarly in 2010 we found
that more than three percent of non-citizens reported
voting.
These results speak to both sides of the debate con­
cerning non-citizen enfranchisement. They support the
claims made by some anti-immigration organizations
that non-citizens participate in U.S. elections. In addition,
the analysis suggests that non-citizens' votes have
changed signiﬁcant election outcomes including the
assignment of North Carolina's 2008 electoral votes, and
the pivotal Minnesota Senate victory of Democrat Al
Franken in 2008.
However, our results also support the arguments made
by voting and immigrant rights organizations that the
portion of non-citizen immigrants who participate in U.S.
elections is quite small. Indeed, given the extraordinary
efforts made by the Obama and McCain campaigns to
mobilize voters in 2008, the relatively small portion of noncitizens who voted in 2008 likely exceeded the portion of
non-citizens voting in other recent U.S. elections.
Our results also suggest that photo-identiﬁcation re­
quirements are unlikely to be effective at preventing elec­
toral participation by non-citizen immigrants: In 2008,
more than two thirds of non-citizen immigrants who
indicated that they were asked to show photoidentiﬁcation reported that they went on to cast a vote. A
potential response to the inefﬁcacy of photo-id at pre­
venting non-citizen voting is found in laws recently passed
by Kansas and Arizona that require voter registrants to
prove citizenship. By highlighting and emphasizing the
citizenship requirement (and by requiring documentation
non-citizens should be unable to provide) it seems likely
that such laws would prevent more non-citizens from
voting. That said, enforcement would be critical for efﬁcacy
(and much would depend here upon local election ofﬁ­
cials), particularly since federal voter registration forms do
not require proof of citizenship. In addition, already

 J.T. Richman et al. / Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157

155

Table A.1
Race and citizenship status.
Citizenship status

Race

White
Black
Hispanic
Asian
Native American
Mixed
Other
Middle Eastern

Total

Total

Immigrant citizen

Immigrant non-citizen

First generation

Second generation

Third generation

647
47.0%
134
9.7%
353
25.6%
167
12.1%
5
0.4%
20
1.5%
40
2.9%
11
0.8%
1377
100.0%

150
44.2%
31
9.1%
91
26.8%
55
16.2%
0
0.0%
5
1.5%
5
1.5%
2
0.6%
339
100.0%

1622
62.3%
91
3.5%
581
22.3%
156
6.0%
8
0.3%
68
2.6%
66
2.5%
13
0.5%
2605
100.0%

6442
89.1%
68
0.9%
405
5.6%
36
0.5%
38
0.5%
94
1.3%
147
2.0%
2
0.0%
7232
100.0%

18,002
85.3%
1668
7.9%
550
2.6%
30
0.1%
260
1.2%
270
1.3%
320
1.5%
3
0.0%
21,103
100.0%

registered non-citizens might well be able to continue
voting. In any case such measures would come with sig­
niﬁcant costs for some citizens for whom the necessary
documentation could be challenging to provide.
Ultimately, the results of our analysis provide a basis for
informed reﬂection concerning the role of non-citizens in
U.S. elections. They demonstrate that in spite of de-jure
barriers to participation, a small portion of non-citizen
immigrants do participate in U.S. elections, and that this
participation is at times substantial enough to change
important election outcomes including Electoral College
votes and Senate races. For those who wish to further
restrict participation by non-citizens, however, our results
also provide important cautions. Simple resort to voter
photo-identiﬁcation rules is unlikely to be particularly
effective.
Appendix 1: Validating citizen status self reports
One potential concern about the results presented in
this paper is that they might reﬂect survey response errors.
Speciﬁcally, if some citizens intentionally or inadvertently
indicated that they were non-citizens, this could produce
the pattern we ﬁnd e a small number of apparent noncitizens engaging in the political process. While we ﬁnd it
implausible that citizens would intentionally claim to be
non-citizen immigrants, it is possible that some citizens
could have inadvertently selected this response. This ap­
pendix evaluates that possibility.
Given conﬁdentiality and legal issues, it is not ethi­
cally possible to directly verify whether individuals who
voted were/are non-citizens. Instead, we examine the
construct or concurrent validity by showing that selfreported non-citizens had demographic and attitudinal
characteristics one would expect them to have if they
were in fact non-citizen immigrants, and that the noncitizens who voted had similar attitudes and character­
istics to the non-citizens who didn't vote on questions

26,863
82.3%
1992
6.1%
1980
6.1%
444
1.4%
311
1.0%
457
1.4%
578
1.8%
31
0.1%
32,656
100.0%

where one might expect those who were in fact noncitizen immigrants to be distinct from the broader
population.

A.1. Demographic characteristics
Given immigration patterns in recent decades, noncitizens should be more likely to be non-white than the
general population surveyed. Table A.1 summarizes the
racial characteristics of individuals with various immigra­
tion statuses among 2008 survey respondents. Non-citizen
immigrants had the lowest percentage of whites, and the
highest percentages of Hispanics and Asians. None identi­
ﬁed as Native Americans. All analyses in the appendix use
unweighted data because the goal is to evaluate the char­
acteristics of the sample.
If the self-declared non-citizens who voted were actually
non-citizens, their racial distribution should be similar to that
of non-citizens who did not vote.8 In Table A.2, we divide non­
citizens into two groups: those who voted (said they voted,
had a veriﬁed vote, or both) and those who did not, and
compare their racial characteristics. Non-citizen immigrants
who voted are not statistically distinguishable from noncitizen immigrants who voted, and several of the nonsigniﬁcant differences in demographic characteristics skew
in the direction of demographics less like those of citizens. For
instance, there are fewer Whites among the voters than the
nonvoters, and more Hispanics and Blacks. Results from 2010
are omitted in the interest of saving space, but they reveal the
same patterns, with non-citizens who voted reporting slightly
(but not signiﬁcantly) more racial diversity, and fewer whites
than even among non-citizens who did not vote.

8
One important caveat is in order. To the extent that non-citizen voting
is dependent upon an ability to ‘pass for’ a citizen at the polling place,
respondents who looked less like immigrants to election ofﬁcials might
have an easier time voting.

 156

J.T. Richman et al. / Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157

Table A.2
Racial characteristics of non-citizen voters and non-voters, 2008.

Race

White
Black
Hispanic
Asian
Mixed
Other
Middle Eastern

Total

Did not vote

Voted

Total

129
44.3%
24
8.2%
77
26.5%
50
17.2%
5
1.7%
4
1.4%
2
0.7%
291
100.0%

21
43.8%
7
14.6%
14
29.2%
5
10.4%
0
0.0%
1
2.1%
0
0.0%
48
100.0%

150
44.2%
31
9.1%
91
26.8%
55
16.2%
5
1.5%
5
1.5%
2
0.6%
339
100.0%

Across all ﬁve issues, the difference between citizen and
non-citizen responses is statistically signiﬁcant and sub­
stantively large. Those who identiﬁed themselves as noncitizens have views that are distinctly different from
those who identiﬁed themselves as citizens.
To further investigate whether those self-declared noncitizens who voted might have mis-stated their citizenship
status, Table A.4 compares the immigration attitudes of
non-citizens who said they voted with the immigration
attitudes of non-citizens who said they did not vote. Only
three questions are included because none of the noncitizens in the subsamples asked the other two questions
identiﬁed themselves as voters.
Table A.4
Immigration attitudes of non-citizens by voting status (2010 CCES).

Grant legal status

A.2. Immigration attitudes

Increase border patrol

The 2010 CCES included a battery of questions on
immigration attitudes. These questions provide a good
opportunity to use attitudinal variables to check the val­
idity of the citizenship measure. Non-citizen immigrants
might be expected to have distinctive positions on immi­
gration issues, given the potential for immigration policy
choices to directly affect themselves or their families. The
speciﬁc immigration questions asked respondents to select
as many options as they wished from among a list of items:
What do you think the U.S. government should do about
immigration. Select all that apply.
•  Fine Businesses
•  Grant legal status to all illegal immigrants who have
held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years and have not
been convicted of felony crimes.
•  Increase the number of guest workers allowed to come
legally to the US.
•  Increase the number of border patrols on the U.S.­
Mexican border.
•  Allow police to question anyone they think may be in
the country illegally.
•  None of these.
For all of these items, the choices selected by non-citizen
immigrants were statistically different from those made by ot
her respondents. The number of respondents and the percent
supporting each policy is summarized in Table A.3 below.
Table A.3
Immigration attitudes of citizens and non-citizens (2010 CCES).

Fine businesses 
Grant legal status 
Increase border patrol 
Increase guest workers 
Allow police to question 

Citizens

Non citizens

Total responses

1786
73.7%
21,162
38.7%
34,057
62.2%
659
27.2%
26,531
48.5%

6
35.3%
310
63.4%
201
41.1%
8
47.1%
96
19.6%

2438**
55,234**
55,234**
2438*
55,234**

Chi-Square test: ** difference signiﬁcant at p < .001 level. * Difference
signiﬁcant at p < .10 level.

Allow police to question

Didn't vote

Voted

Total responses

285
62.6%
186
40.9%
87
19.1%

25
73.5%
15
44.1%
9
26.5%

489
489
489

Note: All voting status is based on self-reported vote as no votes were
veriﬁed for 2010 CCES. * Chi-square difference signiﬁcant at p < .10 level.

As expected, there are no signiﬁcant differences in atti­
tudes toward immigration among respondents who identi­
ﬁed as non-citizens, irrespective of whether or not they
voted. This is what we would expect if respondents' selfidentiﬁcation is valid. On one of three questions (grant
legal status) non-citizens who voted were slightly (not
signiﬁcantly) more likely to take the pro-immigrant position.
A.3. State non-citizen population
If respondents who indicate they are non-citizens are in
fact non-citizens, then they should be more likely to reside
in states with larger non-citizen populations. To test this
idea, we computed the percentage of adult non-citizens per
state using Census Bureau (2013) data (2007e2011 Amer­
ican Community Survey 5 year estimates). We then used
this percentage to predict whether respondents would
indicate they were non-citizens across states on the 2008
CCES. The percentage of non-citizens was a very statisti­
cally signiﬁcant predictor of self-identiﬁed non-citizen
status in a binary logit analysis (B ¼ 11.34, S.E. ¼ 1.05,
p < .0005), and remained statistically signiﬁcant with a
very similar effect size when analysis was restricted to only
individuals who had self-identiﬁed or veriﬁed votes
(B ¼ 11.25, S.E. ¼ 2.77, p < .0005). Similar results were
obtained for 2010, with the analysis of all respondents
producing the following coefﬁcient and signiﬁcance levels
(B ¼ 8.86, S.E. ¼ 0.88, p < .0005) and the analysis of voters
producing the following results (B ¼ 6.4, S.E. ¼ 3.3,
p < .053). In 2010 it is once more not possible to reject the
null hypothesis that the coefﬁcients are the same.
A.4. Conclusion
The results presented in this appendix support the
conclusion that those who identiﬁed themselves as non­

 J.T. Richman et al. / Electoral Studies 36 (2014) 149e157

citizens had the demographic characteristics one would
expect non-citizens to have, and non-citizens who voted
were not appreciably different from non-citizens who did
not vote in terms of their political attitudes towards
immigration, their geographic distribution, and their racial
demographics. Therefore, it is unlikely that a substantial
number of citizen respondents (inadvertently) indicated
that they were non-citizens.
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