NEED TO KNOW

• Heritage's election fraud database lists roughly 1,500 proven cases since 1982.
• Just 68 involve noncitizen voting — and only 10 are undocumented immigrants.
• Project 2025 architects use this data to push citizenship-verification mandates.

WASHINGTON (TDR) — The Heritage Foundation's own election fraud database documents 10 undocumented immigrants voting in American elections over roughly four decades. The same resource is cited by Project 2025 architects pushing federal citizenship-verification mandates.

The big picture: The think tank that authored Project 2025 has spent years collecting proven instances of election fraud to argue for stricter voting laws. Independent reviews of that same database produce the opposite conclusion.

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• The Brennan Center found the database contained just 41 cases of noncitizen voting across five decades when first reviewed in 2017.
• A more recent American Immigration Council analysis tallied 68 total noncitizen cases, with only 10 involving undocumented immigrants.
• Heritage itself describes the database as "a sampling," not an exhaustive count.

Why it matters: Citizenship-verification mandates are reshaping state voter rolls and federal policy. The factual basis for those changes is increasingly thin.

• Newsweek reported the database now totals 1,561 instances against more than a billion votes cast since 1982.
• Brookings calculated Pennsylvania logged 39 fraud cases against over 100 million votes across 30 years.
• A 2017 Brennan analysis found suspected noncitizen voting referrals across 42 jurisdictions hit 0.0001% of ballots cast.

Driving the news: Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage senior legal fellow and Project 2025 contributor, has outlined how DHS and DOJ should pursue aggressive citizenship verification under the second Trump administration. The Brennan Center reports DOJ has already created a special unit to investigate alleged election crimes. Texas Republicans cited the same Heritage data to justify SB 1113, which lets the state withhold funds from counties that fail to purge noncitizens from voter rolls.

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What they're saying:

• Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, American Immigration Council — "The lessons to take from Heritage's own database are that noncitizen voting is not a serious problem and that to the extent rare cases occur, they would be best addressed by better training government workers."
• Darrell West, Brookings Institution — "It's a criminal offense to commit ballot fraud, and most people don't want to go to jail. So that's a sufficient deterrent for almost everybody."
• The Heritage Foundation — The database is "intended to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed."

Yes, but: Heritage is correct the database is not exhaustive. Undetected fraud cannot be counted, and prosecution rates depend on state enforcement priorities. Critics citing the database against Heritage's own framing are using a promotional sampling, not a scientific audit. The honest read cuts both ways: nobody has produced evidence of significant noncitizen voting, including the institution most motivated to find it.

Between the lines: A think tank doesn't spend eight years building a public database, promote it as proof of systemic vulnerability, then disclaim it as anecdotal when totals don't support the alarm. Heritage built the resource to argue a case. The case it actually proves is that existing legal architecture (federal prohibition, state prosecution, identity verification) already catches what it's designed to catch. Project 2025's citizenship-verification push isn't downstream of the data. The data is downstream of the political project.

What's next:

• Federal lawsuits over DHS citizenship-data sharing with states are working through courts.
• State legislatures continue advancing proof-of-citizenship registration laws, including Texas SB 1113.
• The 2026 midterms will be the first national test of the verification regime built on this data.

If 10 proven cases in 40 years justifies a federal verification regime, what evidence would ever justify rolling one back?

Sources

This report was compiled using reporting from the American Immigration Council, the Brennan Center for Justice, Brookings, Newsweek, Democracy Docket, KERA News, and The Heritage Foundation.

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