How losers cope: Georgia’s audits shred the noncitizen voting excuse

If you've heard the claim that noncitizens are voting in Georgia and found yourself quietly wondering whether your ballot is getting canceled out, here is what happens when the state actually goes looking: it finds essentially nothing. In 2022, Georgia's first statewide citizenship review found no noncitizen voters — a result the Atlanta Journal-Constitution summed up with the headline "No noncitizen voters found in Georgia election review." In 2024, the state found 20 noncitizens registered among roughly 8.2 million voters, nine of whom had ever cast a ballot. This year's audit put the rolls at more than 99.9% accurate, with no evidence of widespread fraud.

Why the claim is back

The Trump administration's Justice and Homeland Security departments have revived it ahead of the November 3 midterms, publicizing charges against people alleged to be noncitizens who voted and demanding that states review ballots. Legal experts described the crackdown largely as political messaging meant to anticipate possible losses and seed doubt in midterm results; the White House denied a political motive and framed it as election security.

Georgia is where that claim lands hardest. Joe Biden carried the state in 2020 by 11,779 votes, a result confirmed by three counts including a full hand recount. This year's race for governor is an open seat between Republican Rick Jackson and Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms, rated a Toss-Up; an Atlanta Journal-Constitution/University of Georgia poll from October 7-15 put Jackson at 46% and Bottoms at 45%, inside the 3.1-point margin of error. With margins that close, a story about even a handful of supposed extra ballots travels far.

But Georgia is the best witness on this question because, instead of merely insisting its rolls are clean, the state's election officials have gone looking. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has overseen repeated, publicly reported citizenship audits of the state's voter rolls. Raffensperger put it plainly: "And then we audit the fool out of it to show you that those machines are accurate, the vote count is accurate, and the winner won. And that's our job." Ahead of this election, the state planned to run 20 risk-limiting audits covering all 14 congressional districts and six statewide races — up from one per statewide election between 2020 and 2025.

What the checks found

Georgia has checked registration records against the federal SAVE system and Department of Driver Services records in 2022, 2024, and again this year. What it has turned up, each time, amounts to a rounding error at most.

The March 2022 review found 1,634 people who had attempted to register to vote but could not be verified as U.S. citizens through the federal SAVE system. All were placed in "pending citizenship" status; none were added to the rolls, and none cast a ballot. The review identified 2,258 applications in pending-citizenship status overall — the 1,634 unverifiable cases plus 624 flagged by Georgia Department of Driver Services records — spanning 88 counties and dating from 1997 through February 24, 2022.

The October 2024 audit found 20 noncitizens registered among roughly 8.2 million registered voters. Nine of those 20 had previously cast a ballot; the other eleven had never voted. The state canceled all 20 registrations, referred them to local prosecutors, and flagged 156 additional cases — and none of the 20 voted in the November 2024 general election.

This year's Department of Audits and Accounts review, updated in September 2026, found 2,570 potential noncitizen registrations that had reached active or inactive status because of administrative errors, with 407 of them — about 16% — carrying any recorded voting history and those registrations remaining active for a median of 5.2 years. The audit did not establish that all 407 people were noncitizens when they voted; cases were built from citizenship indicators, affidavits, driver-services records and SAVE searches, and some may have become citizens later or simply had incorrect state records. The audit concluded the rolls were more than 99.9% accurate and found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, attributing the discrepancies mainly to Department of Driver Services coding mistakes, automatic-registration applications filed before citizenship was verified, and county verification failures.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution review put the outside envelope at roughly 430 people who may not have been U.S. citizens when they voted over the previous 30 years — a potential count, not proof of unlawful ballots — equal to about 0.005% of Georgia's roughly 8.2 million registered voters.

Federal claims, checked

Federal claims have not held up under the same scrutiny. When Homeland Security officials flagged supposed noncitizen voters in Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found most of those people were never voters at all. The Secretary of State's office also disputed a report claiming about 400 noncitizens voted in Georgia in 2020, pointing instead to the state's own 2024 audit figure of 20 noncitizen registrations among more than 8 million voters. In October 2026, federal officials requested information about 13 Georgia voters as part of a broader investigation; state election officials said cases of noncitizens registering or voting are rare.

What this means for your ballot

Your ballot is real, recorded once, and counted once. The results you have watched over the years — down to an 11,779-vote margin that the state counted and recounted by hand — are the actual results, not numbers padded or offset by outside votes. Even the discrepancies Georgia's audits turned up trace mainly to paperwork: coding errors at the Department of Driver Services and automatic-registration applications filed before citizenship was verified, rather than people showing up to vote illegally.

So the one thing to do is vote. Check your own record on the state's My Voter Page at mvp.sos.ga.gov, which shows your registration status, polling place, early-voting locations and hours, and a sample ballot. The voter-registration deadline for this election was October 5; early in-person voting runs October 13 through October 30; and on Election Day, November 3, polling places are open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

The one thing not to lose sleep over is a foreign ballot canceling yours out. Georgia has gone looking for noncitizen voters year after year, and what it keeps finding is essentially nothing.