Cato Podcast Unlawful Voting Is a Tiny Problem
Mar 5, 2026
Stephen Richer, a legal fellow and former state election administrator in Maricopa County, brings practical election-admin expertise. He discusses why claims of widespread unlawful voting don’t match investigation data. He explains how database matching inflates mismatch counts. He also talks about improving voter-roll maintenance, risks of federal databases, and where real fraud tends to occur.
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Non-Citizen Voting Is Practically Nonexistent
- Non-citizen voting in federal and statewide elections is vanishingly rare, often amounting to effectively zero in investigated cases.
- Heritage Foundation database shows only ~20 prosecutions over 30 years and local audits typically find rates near 0.001% of registrants.
Database Matches Inflate The Problem
- Database matching often produces large lists of 'mismatches' that shrink dramatically after manual investigation.
- Iowa county examples shrank from ~100 flagged cases to ~10 after checking naturalizations and data-entry errors.
Immigrant Groups Asked To Fix Motor Voter Traps
- Motor Voter design flaws have unintentionally registered noncitizens who feared deportation and pleaded for form fixes.
- Immigrant groups in Washington asked the state to redesign intake forms to prevent accidental registrations.