ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s top elections official said Wednesday that a check of voter rolls found that 20 of the 8.2 million people registered to vote in the state are not U.S. citizens.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said during a news conference that the voter registrations for those people had been canceled and that they will be referred to local prosecutors for potential criminal charges. His office said none of those people has cast a ballot in November’s general election, but nine of the 20 had voted in previous elections and the other 11 had no record of voting.
The majority of the nine noncitizens who voted did so before 2012, said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office.
“One of the reason the secretary ordered this non-citizenship audit is to prove to people that, while there are ways that someone can get on (the voter rolls), it is ceasingly rare,” Sterling said in comments reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “There is no proof that there is an overwhelming number of noncitizens on the rolls.”
Additionally, there are 156 people whose citizenship status requires additional investigation and his office has opened case files for those individuals, Raffensperger said.
While the potential for noncitizens to register or vote has gotten a lot of attention as a Republican talking point in this election year, data indicates that voting by noncitizens is rare.
The Georgia secretary of state’s office announced in July that it was in the process of checking the voter rolls for noncitizens using state and federal databases. Raffensperger said the 20 people who were conclusively identified as noncitizens lived in seven counties, mostly in metro Atlanta, and had filled out a sworn statement saying they were not citizens to get out of jury duty.
