Here’s how Illinois election authorities guard against noncitizen voting

SPRINGFIELD – Illinois election officials said this week they believe the state’s voter registration are accurate and up to date and that safeguards are in place to prevent non-U.S. citizens from inadvertently becoming registered to vote.

Since 1982, Illinois State Board of Elections spokesperson Matt Dietrich said, only 10 noncitizens have been found to have voted in an Illinois election.

“That’s 10 cases in 44 years.” Dietrich told Capitol News Illinois, referring to information published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank. “Every two years, you have approximately 5 to 6 million votes being cast. So, you’re talking really about hundreds of millions of votes cast, with 10 prosecutions.”

The U.S. Department of Justice is currently suing the state board for access to a complete, unredacted copy of the state’s entire voter registration database. That would include sensitive information such as dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of all 8.3 million registered voters in Illinois.

The agency says it needs that information to ensure Illinois is complying with federal requirements to regularly scrub the database of people who should not be registered, including people who have died, moved to a different address or people who are found not to be U.S. citizens.

Similar lawsuits have been filed in dozens of other states and Washington, D.C. So far, judges in 15 of those cases have ruled against the department, finding it has no legal authority to demand access to states’ sensitive voter data. No judge has yet ruled in DOJ’s favor, although cases in Illinois and several other states are still pending.

DOJ has also threatened criminal prosecution of any state election official anywhere in the country if it finds noncitizens have been allowed to register or cast ballots.

Citizenship question

Under the National Voter Registration Act, also known as the “Motor Voter” law, voters are not required to show proof of U.S. citizenship when they register to vote. Instead, they attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are U.S. citizens when filling out their voter registration applications.

“And that attestation also contains language that tells them if they provide false information, they’ll be subject to prosecution, deportation, and denial of entry to the country should they ever try to enter again,” Dietrich said.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, several states have passed laws requiring proof of citizenship to register. But courts have generally held that states do not have authority to enact additional requirements for registration in federal elections.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case in its upcoming term that challenges an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship. Meanwhile, a bill known as the SAVE America Act is pending before Congress.  The Republican-backed bill is supported by President Donald Trump but is currently stalled in the Senate.

That bill would require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote as well as photo identification when casting a ballot. It would also require states to take affirmative steps to identify noncitizens who are registered to vote and to delete those individuals from the voter rolls.

For most people, proof of citizenship could include a valid U.S. passport or a certified birth certificate paired with a photo ID. But critics argue it would impose significant burdens on certain individuals including married women or anyone who has ever changed their name, or people who were not born in a hospital and don’t have birth certificates.

Automatic registration

One way in which noncitizens can inadvertently become registered to vote is through automatic registration when applying for a driver’s license or state identification card.

That came to light Tuesday when New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill acknowledged an estimated 6,600 noncitizens were inadvertently registered between June 2023 and June 2024 due to a software glitch at that state’s Motor Vehicle Commission.

“Our preliminary analysis shows fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted,” Sherrill said in a statement. “They were registered as Democrats, Republicans and Unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state.”

Illinois experienced a similar glitch in late 2019 when an estimated 545 noncitizens were mistakenly entered as registered voters due to a glitch in the automatic voter registration system that the state had adopted just two years earlier. Of those, 15 individuals were able to cast ballots, although three of those turned out to be citizens.

“That software glitch was fixed,” Dietrich said Tuesday.

He also said no prosecutions resulted from that error, and that then-Secretary of State Jesse White issued letters to all of the people who were mistakenly registered accepting responsibility for the error and advising them not to vote in any election.

“We, along with the secretary of state (Jesse White at that time), spoke to some legislative committees about this, explained what had happened,” he said. “The secretary of state really re-did that whole system and now, if you check ‘no’ on that attestation, you cannot go forward into the automatic voter registration. Your driver’s license process can continue, but your information will not be forwarded to us. So we cleared that up.”

Voter list maintenance

Dietrich noted that in Illinois, the primary responsibility for keeping voter lists accurate and up-to-date rests with local election authorities, not the state.

Those include the county clerks in 101 of the state’s 102 counties. Cook County has a separate Board of Elections. And eight cities in Illinois – Bloomington; Chicago; Danville; East St. Louis; Galesburg; and Rockford – have their own municipal boards of elections.

“They are responsible for maintaining their own voter rolls locally, and what we do at the state board is we provide administrative assistance for them to do that,” Dietrich said.

John Ackerman, the county clerk in Tazwell County who often serves as a spokesperson for local election authorities, said the primary method local officials use to clean up their voter rolls is by direct mail to verify whether voters are still living at the same address.

In odd-numbered years, he said, his office mails a voter registration card to every registered voter in the county.

“If that should be bounced back or returned as undeliverable – they’re not forwardable – then that can help us initiate the process of removing an individual from our rolls,” he said.

In addition, he said, in even-numbered years, state law requires local authorities to send voters a reminder notice that they may apply for a mail-in ballot for state and federal elections.

“With that being a letter to all registered voters, a certified letter from our office, I utilize it to perform the purge as well,” Ackerman said. “So in my county, I’m actually accomplishing that every year, and there are other counties that have picked up and done that as well. But not all counties do that. At a minimum, every county is doing it every other year.”

In addition to direct mail verifications, Ackerman said, Illinois is among 26 states, plus Washington, D.C., that share voter registration and motor vehicle data through the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. That system also receives change-of-address information from the U.S. Postal Service as well as death notifications from the Social Security Administration.

Dietrich said that between new registrations, change of address notifications and death notices, local officials are constantly updating their registration rolls, and the most current lists are uploaded to the State Board of Elections nightly.

“Every day, the 108 local election authorities upload their own databases because every day, no matter how small your county is, someone else is registering, someone is being removed,” Dietrich said. “Things are changing every day, so that data gets uploaded to us nightly.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.