Louisiana’s top election official said she has discovered 390 non-citizen registered voters in the state, with 79 voting in at least one election over the past several decades.
The 390 suspected non-citizen voters represent approximately 0.01% of the roughly 2.9 million registered voters in Louisiana.
Secretary of State Nancy Landry, a Republican, said Thursday at a news conference she called that the results are the “preliminary findings” of an investigation her office launched in May after gaining access to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, which the Trump administration rolled out to state and local governments this year.
Landry said her investigators ran names from Louisiana’s voter rolls through the SAVE database and worked with the FBI to confirm their citizenship status. Investigators scoured state voting records going back to the 1980s, she said.
Landry declined to release further details about the suspects of the incidents of alleged fraud, saying her investigation remains ongoing.
In a later interview, Landry acknowledged the possibility that some of her findings could be attributed to errors or outdated information. Suspected non-citizen voters will be afforded due process to determine if they are innocent, she said.
While Landry said voter fraud is “not a systemic problem in Louisiana,” she noted that some local elections have been decided by just a handful of votes. She didn’t say if the newly discovered noncitizen voters impacted any of those elections.
It’s a crime under state and federal laws for noncitizens to vote or to submit false voter registration information. Landry said her office is working with local and federal authorities to determine if anyone implicated in her findings can be prosecuted.
The secretary of state’s investigators have not interviewed or spoken to any of the alleged suspects but have sent out letters notifying them of the findings, she said.
Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, R-Port Allen, who chairs the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, attended Landry’s news conference alongside his counterpart in the House, Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia. Kleinpeter authored recent changes for stricter state elections laws and said he was surprised that only 79 noncitizens have voted in Louisiana over so many years.
Kleinpeter said he thought the number would be higher, adding that even one unlawful vote is too many.
“Every illegal vote counts against a legal vote,” Kleinpeter said in an interview.
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One voting rights advocate questions why the secretary of state would go public with preliminary findings of an investigation before all the evidence has been collected.
Ashley Shelton, who leads the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, noted that state investigators haven’t spoken to any of the alleged suspects.
“Why do a press conference if you’re not really sure, or you don’t have undeniable evidence that the allegations are true?” Shelton said in a phone interview. “Of course everybody wants elections to have integrity, but there’s a reason why they had to go back to the 1980s to uncover the alleged 79 people.”
Shelton said bigger problems with election integrity stem from the way they are administered and failure to educate poll workers and voters when election rules are changed.
“Voting rights are under attack,” Shelton said. “We have so many elections we can’t even keep count, and there’s no willingness to streamline the process.”
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