Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Voter Fraud and Voter Suppression

By Joyce Vance, Sep 03, 2026

If you’ve read my book, Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy, you’re familiar with the basic idea. Republicans have historically—they used this tactic during the civil rights era in the Deep South—used false claims of voter fraud to justify restrictive measures that make it more difficult, or entirely prevent, eligible citizens from voting. Donald Trump has mastered the art of using these kinds of fake narratives.

We explore that tonight.

Trump’s voter fraud claims have never made sense to anyone who stepped back to examine them. How could there be fraud that affected only Trump, at the top of the ticket, but not the Republican senators, House members, governors, and so forth who were elected on the same ballot? The same problem gives the lie to Trump’s claims that massive numbers of “illegal aliens” (or, as I think of them, people) voted in our elections. If that were true, how did Trump win and get GOP majorities in both houses of Congress? It doesn’t make sense. And that’s because it isn’t true.

The Supposed Fraud

Do some people who aren’t citizens register? Do a small number of them vote? According to the data compiled by states, the answer is yes, but the numbers are minuscule. Alabama’s MAkGA Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen found 186 noncitizens registered to vote in Alabama in a January 2026 report and that 25 of them had voted in a past election. That’s 0.000675675676% of the 3.7 million registered voters in the state. In 2025, Allen claimed he identified 3,200 noncitizens who were registered to vote, before he walked it back.

Some data compiled by states that have conducted “proactive investigations since January 1, 2021 by election officials into the presence of noncitizens on voter rolls” has been collected here. It gives us a sense of the scope of the “problem.” For instance, in Florida, which has 13.4 million registered voters, the state referred 170 people who had possibly registered or voted despite being noncitizens to state and federal authorities. No word was given on the results of those investigations.

Source: Voter Fraud and Voter Suppression