Georgia refers 20 noncitizens on voter rolls to local authorities

Raffensperger said his office conducted a “comprehensive citizenship audit” this summer and “conclusively” found the noncitizens and 156 other potential noncitizens that his office is still investigating.

The Republican secretary of state said his office cross-references Georgia voter rolls with several databases to regularly track people who need to be removed for reasons such as moving, dying or otherwise becoming ineligible to vote.

He touted that, due to his office’s efforts, Georgia has “the cleanest voter rolls in the entire country.”

Raffensperger’s citizenship announcement comes as several states, including Texas, Ohio and Virginia, make announcements in the final weeks of the 2024 elections about how to find potential noncitizens on their voter rolls. On Tuesday, Ohio Attorney General David Yost revealed that his office was investigating dozens of cases of alleged noncitizen voting and that a grand jury indicted six people in connection with it.

Gabriel Sterling, another senior official in the secretary of state’s office, said “one of the reasons” Raffensperger ordered the summer audit was to increase confidence in the face of polls that show Republicans have widespread concerns that non-citizens are getting away with voting, which is illegal.

“One of the reasons the secretary ordered this noncitizenship audit is to prove to people that while there are ways some can potentially get on (the registration list), that is increasingly rare, and especially in a state like Georgia, which has very good data management,” Sterling said.

Raffensperger’s press conference comes two weeks before Election Day and more than 1.9 million people in Georgia have already voted.

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The Republican secretary of state drew the ire of former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election because Trump felt Raffensperger was allowing alleged voter fraud to occur.

During a now-infamous phone call with Raffensperger weeks after the election, Trump said he wanted to “find 11,780” votes to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Raffensperger faced a Trump-endorsed challenger in his 2022 re-election bid and won the race handily.