DeMaio plays into border, voter fraud fears for race in California’s 75th District

Republican Carl DeMaio began his speech at a recent campaign rally in Lakeside with an alarming yet familiar message: Immigration at the southern border poses a major threat. 

“We are facing an invasion that is threatening our national security and bankrupting our communities,” said DeMaio, who’s running to represent the state Assembly’s 75th District, which spans East County up to Riverside County to the U.S.-Mexico border.  

DeMaio then spent 20 minutes denouncing the state of the border and California politics more broadly – eliciting cheers as he called the crowd to “stay and fight” in “the bloodiest part of the battlefield” – before making one final point: “We’ve got to secure our elections just as we secure our border.” 

It’s a rhetorical strategy DeMaio has employed often in his campaign for one of California’s few reliably red districts – connecting voters’ concerns over border security with their mistrust in U.S. elections.

But research has broadly failed to find evidence that unlawful voting by immigrants happens on a scale big enough to impact the outcome of elections. In fact, many studies show voter fraud in general, though it happens, often results from mistakes and is extremely rare. 

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in state and federal elections. Registering to vote as a noncitizen carries up a penalty of prison time and immigration consequences, including deportation.

Still, there’s evidence DeMaio’s message is resonating with voters. DeMaio won 43% of the vote in the March primary. Republican Andrew Hayes barely finished second in the primary with 19% support. As the top two primary vote-getters, DeMaio and Hayes will compete in the November general election. (Hayes recently won the endorsement of the Republican Party of San Diego after the party broke from DeMaio).

Both DeMaio and Hayes say voters tell them all the time that they are concerned about border and election security. Both also say they support requiring voters to show proof of identification to vote, and DeMaio has been driving an effort to get a voter ID law on the ballot, something he says will happen in 2026.

“People say, ‘Why do you always talk about voter ID and the border?’ Well, I’ll tell you why I’m talking about voter ID and the border. Unless we can secure the border, we are not going to have elections we can have confidence in,” DeMaio said at the Sept. 15 rally. 

DeMaio is not alone. Other Republicans across the country have also pushed legislation that would require voters to show proof of identity, claiming, among other reasons, that noncitizens are threatening the safety of U.S. elections. 

DeMaio has repeatedly pointed to a 50-page study from the Transparency Foundation published in June 2023 as “irrefutable evidence of voter fraud.” DeMaio is the CEO of the Transparency Foundation and received $110,000 from the nonprofit in 2023, according to its federal 990 tax filing. 

The study doesn’t actually include any instances of votes cast illegally by noncitizens in California. 

When asked for evidence of noncitizens actually voting, DeMaio said the report was not designed to capture that, but instead found evidence of noncitizens being registered and vulnerabilities in the elections verification process. Those vulnerabilities, DeMaio says, are evidence enough.

The study does not include the authors, though DeMaio said it was conducted by “a study team.” The report looked at signature matching, a process elections officials use to verify the authenticity of mail-in ballots, and suggested fraud was a factor behind more than half of rejected ballots in the 2022 election remaining “uncured,” or unverified as authentic ballots. 

Statewide, rejected mail-in ballots amounted to 1.2% of the total votes cast that year, according to Secretary of State records.

A key claim the report makes is that 14.17% of rejected ballots in a sample of 388 were “likely fraudulently cast.” The team bases this claim on interviews with registrants who said they did not vote in the election.The study infers that those votes were then fraudulently cast by another party.

The study also infers that a “high rate of no response” from an unspecified number of registrants the team tried to reach but couldn’t raises the possibility that even more ballots were fraudulently cast.

The report also says the disparities among counties in the percentage of total ballots rejected for signature problems means some counties are more rigorous about accurate signature matching than others, meaning fraudulent ballots are likely slipping through the cracks in some counties with low rejection rates. 

Other studies have shown that the opposite could be true: that signature matching may flag legitimate ballots for rejection because of slight differences in the signatures. Of the 388 rejected ballots in the Transparency Foundation study, most – or 81.7% – belonged to voters who said they had in fact cast the ballots in question.

And ultimately, none of those ballots were counted because election officials could not “cure” them, or prove their authenticity. 

“In the case of all 388 ballots studied, the existing safeguards worked and screened them out,” said Walter Olson, senior policy fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research and policy think tank. Olson, whose own research has focused on noncitizen voting, reviewed the study at inewsource’s request. 

Olson said he would need more information to evaluate the study, including how questions to participants were worded and how errors in participant responses were accounted for. The study does not include those details.

But overall, he said, the study “favors stronger screening methods but so far as I see does not attempt to build a case that any large share of unlawful votes are getting past the current screening methods.”

The Transparency Foundation report mentions two incidents in 2018 when the Department of Motor Vehicles made errors on voter registrations, including one in which 1,500 noncitizens were accidentally registered to vote, though none were immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization, the DMV told ABC News at the time.  

The study also included one report from “Will from San Diego” who said he received a ballot for an employee who was a Mexican citizen. 

Other attempts to study the prevalence of noncitizens voting illegally have turned up with few verified instances. 

The Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, found 55 total instances of voter fraud in California from 1993 through 2024 that were confirmed by public officials or prosecutors. Six of the cases involved noncitizens voting illegally or who were registered by someone else.

Its report references a significant incident from 1996 when a Latino community activist organization was accused of registering noncitizens in Orange County. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that noncitizens who talked to the paper had voted in the “hotly contested” election.

A U.S. House subcommittee report later found 748 votes were illegally cast that year, which included 624 from noncitizens, though some committee members said many were naturalized citizens who would have been eligible to vote once they were officially sworn in. 

The Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive leaning public policy and law institute, found in a 2016 study covering 42 jurisdictions across the country that noncitizen votes amounted to 0.0001% of the votes in those areas. None were in California. 

Cynthia Paes, San Diego County’s Registrar of Voters, said in an email her office “is not aware of any instances where a noncitizen has voted in an election conducted in the County of San Diego.”

Though polls show many Americans are worried about fraud in the upcoming elections, there could be another factor contributing to that, said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Marymount University who worked on voting policy during the Obama and Biden administrations.  

“Part of the reason that people don’t trust elections is they’ve been hearing for nine years from the leader of a political party, of a major political party, that you can’t trust elections,” Levitt said. 

The claim that immigrants are interfering in elections actually dates back centuries, Levitt said. 

“It’s not new to claim that ‘they’ are stealing the elections from ‘us.’ That’s a very old nativist, often racist claim scapegoating ‘them’ for people who don’t win elections. And ‘them’ changes,” Levitt said.  

In the 1850s, the scapegoats were Irish immigrants arriving in the U.S. following the famine in Ireland, Levitt said. The fear that they would “steal” elections led states to enact voting rules designed to limit immigrant voting.

Today, critics of voter ID laws say they disenfranchise eligible voters over a concern that isn’t actually playing out the way some politicians have claimed.

While California does not require photo IDs for voters, anyone who registers to vote attests under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen and not otherwise ineligible to vote. 

Voter registrants’ identities are confirmed online through records from the DMV and Social Security Administration, according to the Secretary of State’s office. In some cases, first time voters may be asked for additional documents at the polls. 

Despite both the border and elections being a concern for voters, there isn’t evidence suggesting the two issues are related, said Tom Wong, co-director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at UC San Diego. 

“There is no empirical relationship between immigration and voter fraud,” Wong said.

Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector, which includes the 75th District, recorded about 14,400 unauthorized migrant crossings in August, the most recent month for which data is available. That’s down from more than 37,000 in April, the highest monthly total going back at least 20 years.

The San Diego Sector has been the busiest section of the U.S.-Mexico border for unauthorized crossings since June. 

In Wong’s view, DeMaio’s rhetoric stokes concerns about immigration and uses election fraud claims to vilify immigrants – a strategy seen in other races, too. 

“I think DeMaio is taking a page out of the Trump playbook,” Wong said.

“This is a playbook that we are seeing nationally and it’s no surprise that some would adopt a similar approach in local races, especially in races with districts that may trend a little bit more conservative and a little bit more rural,” he added. 

Editor’s note: This investigation was supported with funding from the
Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by
the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.