2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG
RAPID RESEARCH NOTE
Allegations of non-citizen voting have become one of the most prominent rumors this election period. In this Rapid Research Note from the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, we’ll discuss three videos that fueled this rumor and provide key context on this recurring election narrative. This is adapted from a CIP Election Rumor Research update originally published October 9 as a Substack Note.
Background
Non-citizen voting rumors are a persistent issue during U.S. elections, gaining traction this year with the heightened focus on border and immigration policy. While non-citizens occasionally receive voter registration forms by mistake, actual cases of non-citizens voting remain extremely rare.
Three videos from the Oversight Project, a Heritage Foundation initiative, spread rapidly on X (see image 1). They feature interviews in North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona where residents are asked about voter registration. Through speculative extrapolation, the videos claim that 10% of non-citizens in North Carolina and 14% in Georgia are registered to vote. Each cluster represents a new video dropped.
Image 1: Graph showing the cumulative number of tweets related to rumors based on the misleading videos shared by Oversight Project. Only accounts with over 50,000 followers are visualized, and nodes are sized by follower count. Each vertical increase in engagement is started by the release of the video on X, followed by audience rumoring and amplification by political elites and online influencers.
Video 1:
The first video in this series was posted by the Oversight Project on July 4, showing interviews in North Carolina. With 498.8k views, it was widely shared across X and other platforms like Telegram and Meta. It credited footage from @realmuckraker.
Video 2:
On July 31, a second video from Georgia was posted, hitting 56.1M views. It received a massive boost when Elon Musk shared it on August 1, resulting in it to be the most-watched video in the series.
Video 3:
The third video from Arizona was posted on September 26, amassing 641.2k views. Boosted by major accounts like “End Wokeness” (1.7M views) and SheriTM (1M views), it quickly gained traction on X.
Fact-checks by LeadStories and The New York Times uncovered key issues with the videos: 1) The individuals in Georgia didn’t realize they were being interviewed and responded yes to questions to get the interviewers to leave; and 2) The claims of 14% non-citizen voting in Georgia and 10% in North Carolina are based on unreliable data samples lacking scientific rigor; and 3) The Heritage Foundation later admitted they had no evidence these individuals were registered to vote. Georgia’s state investigators also found no proof that any of the seven people in the video had ever registered. Even the Georgia Secretary of State’s office called it “a stunt.”
In this case, as is common in rumoring, the fact checks received a fraction of the reach that the original videos did. The LeadStories and The New York Times pieces only received 26.5K and 185K views on X, respectively.
Conclusion
We expect non-citizen voting rumors to persist throughout the election and certification process, becoming a central tenet of voter fraud allegations this cycle, despite the Heritage Foundation itself finding fewer than 100 cases between 2002 and 2023 and recent research showing non-citizen voting is statistically negligible, likely close to zero.
Correction: On October 26, 2024, we updated this piece to reflect that the Heritage Foundation database for “ineligible voting” had 85 cases of non-citizen voters between 2002 and 2023, not 23 as The New York Times had reported. This comes from both The Washington Post and our own analysis of the database.
PHOTO AT TOP: A “Vote Here” sign outside a voting location in Crow Wing County, Minnesota. Photo by Lorie Shaull / Flickr via CC BY 2.0