It’s a foregone conclusion that Donald Trump’s claim that “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote” is false. The only question mark is the details of the lie, which the New York Times provides.
According to the Texas secretary of state’s office, 95,000 people are registered to vote who have ever told a law enforcement agency that they weren’t citizens. Ever. Of that 95,000, 58,000 have voted since 1996—not in the last election, but over the course of more than 20 years. So when Trump says that “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas,” he’s missing some things. Most importantly, people can become citizens. In fact, 50,000 people became citizens in Texas in 2017, which means that the 95,000 people who are supposedly both non-citizens and registered to vote represents less than two years’ worth of people naturalized in Texas. But as a side note, again, even if every single one of the 58,000 supposed non-citizens who voted was actually a non-citizen and not someone who became a citizen and then registered to vote, that’s since 1996, not in 2018.
For another perspective on Trump’s fear-mongering, we can look over to Florida, where former Gov. Rick Scott wanted to track down non-citizens registered to vote. He started with a list of 180,000 people suspected, based on drivers license information. He ended up finding an entire 85 people to strike from voter rolls. So, yeah.
Give Trump credit of a sort on this one. At least this time it was possible for the fact-checkers to figure out what he was talking about and where his numbers came from. That doesn’t make them any more accurate, though.