This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s
collaboration with Votebeat, a
nonpartisan news organization covering local election
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The potential risk of noncitizens illegally casting ballots has
dominated the national conversation on election policy in recent
years. But one major voice on the issue hasn’t been heard.

Pennsylvania is home to someone who has perhaps more experience
addressing noncitizen voting than anyone else, a Republican who
uncovered hundreds of noncitizens had registered to vote and cast
ballots in Philadelphia: Secretary of the Commonwealth Al
Schmidt.

“I’ve always heard my whole life, even though I grew up in
Western Pennsylvania, about concerns about voter fraud and voting
irregularities in Philadelphia elections,” Schmidt told Votebeat
and Spotlight PA in a recent interview. “So I wanted to be able to
sort out fact from fiction.”

But despite this experience, Schmidt hasn’t embraced the
exaggerated claims about the prevalence of noncitizen voting common
in today’s political rhetoric. Instead, he feels officials need to
strike a balance between election security and voter access.

PennDOT error led to noncitizens registering to vote

When Schmidt came into office as a Philadelphia city
commissioner in 2012, he began looking into various claims of voter
fraud. Eventually, he discovered that an error with the
Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s motor voter system —
which helps register voters who are obtaining a driver’s license —
was enabling noncitizens to register. (In Pennsylvania, noncitizens
are permitted to obtain a driver’s license.)

As Schmidt explained to
a state Senate committee in 2017, despite PennDOT having the
paperwork confirming the individuals’ noncitizen status, they
weren’t prevented from interacting with the voter registration
screens when completing the license application process. The
programming error that allowed noncitizens to register was fixed in
2017, and state Auditor General Tim DeFoor is currently conducting
an audit to assess the system.

Schmidt discovered that this glitch had led to 168 noncitizens
registering to vote in Philadelphia alone and he discovered an
additional 52 registered by other means. Schmidt found that
collectively they cast 227 votes in the years they were registered.
But the scope of the problem statewide was potentially much
larger.

The glitch that allowed them to register dated
back to the mid-1990s, and in 2018, the state
sent letters to 11,198 voters across the state asking them to
confirm their eligibility, though not necessarily meaning they were
noncitizens. At least 1,915 of those voters were later confirmed to
be eligible, and another 501 registrations were canceled or had
been canceled previously. The state said this week it did not have
an exact count of how many noncitizens were registered as a result
of the error.

For Schmidt, the incident wasn’t just a bureaucratic or election
integrity issue; it also became a personal, human story. Many of
the noncitizen voters Schmidt identified were in the process of
applying for their citizenship but were at risk of having their
applications rejected —
or even being deported — because a simple technical glitch
allowed them to register to vote when they weren’t legally allowed
to. Schmidt went to several immigration court hearings to testify
about how these registrations had been the result of the
government’s mistake.

Schmidt suggested many of the noncitizens who registered through
PennDOT might not have known they were doing anything illegal,
since they had already presented the department with paperwork
showing they weren’t citizens and were given the option to register
anyway. Language barriers or the habit of just clicking through
screens to get to the end could have also played a role, he
said.

“I want to emphasize it’s an election integrity issue, and it is
just a human issue in terms of being decent when it comes to people
who want to become new Americans and any of us would be happy to
have as our friends or neighbors,” he said.

Schmidt still emphasizes the rarity of noncitizen voting

That episode represents one of the largest instances of illegal
noncitizen voting in recent history. But it still represented only
a fraction of a percent of Philadelphia’s roughly 800,000
registered voters at the time. And other recent investigations into
noncitizen voting have turned up even fewer examples.

A recent audit of Utah’s 2.1 million registered voters
found only one noncitizen registered, and they hadn’t actually
voted. Michigan discovered
only 15 potential noncitizens voting in the 2024 election. An

audit of Georgia’s voter rolls in 2024 found only 20 noncitizen
registered voters out of the 8.2 million voters registered in the
state. Even in Florida, where Republican state leaders have been
focused on noncitizen voting,
an audit discovered only 198 voters the state deemed “likely”
noncitizens.

“One thing that became very clear through that research and all
evidence suggests that noncitizens voting in elections in the
United States occurs very rarely,” Schmidt said. “It doesn’t mean
that it’s not important. Like I said before, every vote is
precious, and we want to make sure that we do everything we can to
safeguard and strengthen election integrity. But there’s no
evidence to suggest that it happens in any widespread way
whatsoever.”

Nevertheless, fears about noncitizen voting have risen to the
forefront of election policy debates in recent years, in large part
due to President Donald Trump.

After losing the 2020 election, he
suggested without evidence that his loss was due to immigrants
being registered to vote. He made similar claims
during the 2024 campaign. Last year, he
signed an executive order that sought to mandate proof of
citizenship when registering to vote.

The Department of Justice is
collecting voter rolls from states and
coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security to check
if noncitizens are voting, and Republicans in Congress are pushing
hard to pass a bill, the
SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship when
registering to vote — a step
some GOP-led states have already taken on their own.

Asked what he thinks when he hears this rhetoric, and
specifically when Pennsylvania is brought into the conversation,
Schmidt said people should view the instances of confirmed fraud
that are brought up as examples of the system working properly.

“It’s important that we, I think, see it not as a vulnerability,
but as an aspect of the strength of our system, and that we are
safeguarding election integrity,” he said. “When people break the
law, whether intentionally or not, they’re held accountable.”

Schmidt noted that seeking to identify and remove noncitizens
from voter rolls can inadvertently have harmful effects. In recent
years,
some states searching for noncitizens have flagged voters for
removal who were in fact citizens. A
recent ProPublica investigation found that 14% of Denton
County, Texas, voters flagged as noncitizens by a Department of
Homeland Security database were actually citizens after all.

Schmidt said people need to be able to “walk and chew gum at the
same time.” Policymakers and election officials have to balance
being vigilant about fraud with not overreacting to the low level
at which noncitizen voting occurs.

“It’s important to take it seriously,” Schmidt said. “But at the
same time, putting so many resources behind looking into something
that there’s really no evidence is occurring in any way that’s
widespread or systematic … if not done responsibly, again results
in eligible citizens being disenfranchised from that process, and
certainly can do more harm than good.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with
Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

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