Former President Donald Trump and Republican leaders across the country have for months called the so-called scourge of non-citizen voting a pressing threat to free and fair elections, using fiery rhetoric to suggest that widespread illegal voting could tip the scales towards the Democrats in November.

But a series of surveys conducted by the Republican Party in the weeks leading up to Election Day tell a different story, one that experts have long insisted: Noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare.

Recent audits of voter rolls in states like Georgia, Ohio and Iowa found instances of non-citizen voting that overall represented only a tiny fraction of the states’ total number of registered voters.

A comprehensive audit of Georgia’s voter rolls — which include 8.2 million registered voters — found 20 noncitizens who registered to vote, including nine instances where noncitizens actually voted. A similar audit of Iowa’s 2.3 million voters found 87 cases where individuals voted and then declared themselves non-citizens.

In Ohio, state Attorney General Dave Yost recently announced indictments against six alleged non-citizens who voted in a national election, after the Ohio secretary of state Ohio, Frank LaRose, identified 597 suspected non-citizens who had registered to vote in the state. Each of the six defendants was a legal resident but did not have citizenship at the time they voted.

“Irregularities like this are rare, and these are a small number of cases,” Yost said Tuesday. “We must all have confidence in the upcoming elections, knowing that the laws are being enforced and will continue to be enforced.”

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The national campaign to eliminate non-citizen voting comes as Trump has made non-citizen voting a key part of his campaign message, telling supporters that undocumented immigrants should vote in record numbers in the next presidential election.

“Our elections are bad,” Trump said during the ABC News presidential debate in September. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants that are coming in are trying to get them to vote. They don’t even speak English, they don’t even know what country they’re in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and it’s why they allow them to come to our country.

But while non-citizen voting in national elections is already illegal and rare, critics have pointed to Trump’s rhetoric and national emphasis on non-citizen voting as an attempt to intentionally sow distrust and to prepare the ground for litigation aimed at challenging the election results.

“This is an extremely rare phenomenon that will have no real impact on the outcome of our elections, and in which people who violate the law are held accountable,” said expert Sean Morales-Doyle. in voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit think tank. “Citizens at home and abroad are spreading these lies in order to undermine confidence in U.S. elections – some of them hoping to overturn the results if they are unhappy with them.”

From a sample of 23.5 million votes cast in 42 jurisdictions during the 2016 election, election officials identified 30 incidents of suspected non-citizen voting that were referred for further investigation, representing 0.0001% of the total votes cast, according to a 2017 Brennan Center study. When Georgia audited its 2022 voter rolls, election officials were unable to identify a single case of a non-citizen voting in an election.

Non-citizens are barred from voting in federal elections under a 1996 law that penalizes violators with heavy fines, up to a year in prison, and deportation, which Morales said- Doyle, further discourages crime.

“The reward is voting in an election,” Morales-Doyle said. “It is just mind-boggling to think that someone who has decided to move his family to the United States and try to build a life here is going to risk all of that, risk his freedom and his presence in the United States . vote in an election.

Although cases of non-citizen voting are rare and heavily penalized, Trump has made baseless claims that Democrats are allowing illegal immigration to encourage voter fraud in upcoming elections – a claim echoed by Republican allies such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson.

“I think ultimately they’re hoping to turn all these illegals into voters on their side. It sounds sinister, but there’s no other explanation for what’s going on there,” Johnson said , who unsuccessfully tried last month to pass the SAVE Act requiring documented records. proof of citizenship to vote.

Election experts have raised concerns that states are using unreliable data to flag and purge ineligible voters, which can accidentally trap eligible voters — like Alabama resident Roald Hazelhoff, who became a citizen ago two years.

As Hazelhoff — who immigrated from the Netherlands in the 1970s before putting down roots in Alabama and raising three children — prepared to vote in his first national election earlier this year, he received a letter of the Secretary of State of Alabama informing him thereof. that he did not have the right to vote.

“It’s intimidating,” Hazelhoff told ABC News of the letter, which referred him to possible criminal prosecution because he registered to vote even though he had already received a voter registration number. non-citizen identification decades ago.

“If this happens in Venezuela, we can expect a little bit of that,” he said. “This shouldn’t be happening here. It just shouldn’t be happening.”

Over the past month, the Justice Department has successfully blocked Alabama and Virginia from removing suspected non-citizens from voter rolls because the purges violate federal law barring states from removing names from voter rolls in the 90 days following an election. Federal judges in both states ordered election officials to reinstate the registrations of thousands of voters, including Hazelhoff.

“There is evidence that a very small percentage of individuals and organizations are trying to derail the democratic process, and this is an example of that,” Hazelhoff said. “It’s ill-advised but it’s also dangerous and intimidating.”