Is Non-Citizen Voting a Real Threat to Elections in Wisconsin?

Vote here sign. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump asked his audience to approve the SAVE America Act, “to stop illegal aliens and others who are unpermitted persons from voting in our sacred American elections. The cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant.”

“It’s very simple,” he explained. “All voters must show voter ID. All voters must show proof of citizenship in order to vote. And no more crooked mail-in ballots, except for illness, disability, military or travel.”

Trump’s outburst raises a number of questions. Is voting by illegal immigrants “rampant” in the United States? What is the SAVE Act? And what would be the act’s effect on voting by United States citizens?

There have been several efforts to quantify incidents of election fraud, particularly voting by noncitizens. One is a database of election fraud between 1982 and 2025 managed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. As the next graph shows, Heritage found 68 cases of election fraud in Wisconsin elections during that 43-year period. Only one involved voting by a noncitizen:

Nebi Ademi, 63, a native of Macedonia who resides in Chippewa Falls, successfully cast a ballot in the April 2016 primary election, despite his status as a non-citizen. Ademi filled out a same-day registration, leaving blank the question about his citizenship. District Attorney Steve Gibbs noted that poll workers “should have caught this” and recommended, based on his determination that Ademi had not deliberately broken the law, that the charges against him be changed from election fraud to disorderly conduct. Ademi pleaded no contest. He was ordered to pay $443 in court costs.

Like many of the other Wisconsin cases, Ademi’s violation seems to be more an example of not understanding the rules than a deliberate attempt to commit election fraud. Note that the most common violations of Wisconsin election laws involve people who have been convicted of felonies and who try to vote or succeed in voting before they are allowed to. Wisconsin’s rules on when voting rights are restored are complex and may lead to inadvertent violations.

Considering that more than 3.3 million Wisconsinites voted in the 2024 presidential election, the number of fraudulent votes is negligible. Put another way, Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin over Harris was 29,397, a small margin but decisively more than needed. If the outcome were reversed, it seems certain that Trump would have embarked on an effort to convince election managers to throw out Harris’ victory.

Wisconsin Election Fraud Counts from Heritage Foundation Between 1982 and 2025

Out of 68 cases of election fraud in Wisconsin listed in the Heritage database, only one involved an immigrant, for a rate of 1.5%. If the whole nation is included in the calculation, there were 1,620 cases of election fraud, 80 of which involved an immigrant, or 4.9% of the total number of election fraud cases.

There were numerous other efforts to estimate the rate of immigrants trying to vote, all of which lead to the conclusion that the rate is infinitesimal. Ironically, one such analysis was undertaken by the Trump administration to support his contention that illegal voting by undocumented immigrants is a rampant and insidious threat.

According to a recent article in The New York Times, Homeland Security Investigations, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recently sent a memo requiring its employees to “review all open and closed voter fraud cases” involving immigrants who registered to vote, or actually voted, before they became naturalized U.S. citizens.

The Times reported that out of 49.5 million voter registrations, about 10,000 were referred to Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation, roughly 0.02 percent of the names processed.

It should come as no surprise that the rate of immigrants voting or trying to vote would be extremely low. Unlike with other kinds of fraud, there is little to gain but high potential cost, including fines and prison time if the fraud is detected. For an immigrant, there is the additional cost of being removed from the United States.

The Wisconsin statutes require the Wisconsin Elections Commission to “report suspected election frauds, irregularities, or violations of which the clerk has knowledge to the district attorney for the county where the suspected activity occurs and to the commission.” The commission’s most recent report lists 128 cases of suspected fraud, mostly in 2024 and 2025. Just one of those cases involves noncitizen registration and voting.

It should be remembered that this is a list of suspected fraud, not fraud that has been proven in a court trial. Presumably, if any resulted in a conviction they would have been included in the Heritage Foundation’s database.

Future Data Wonk columns will explore several topics related to voting, the SAVE Act and why these concerns have arisen at this time. At issue is the future of democracy in Wisconsin and the United States.