Every election cycle now brings the same fight: one side insists noncitizen voting is a crisis, the other insists it’s a myth invented to justify purging eligible voters. Both sides are pointing at real data.

New Jersey’s governor has acknowledged roughly 6,600 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, with about 400 having voted. Michigan and Pennsylvania officials have separately found jury-disqualification lists — people excused from jury duty specifically because they’re not citizens — that overlap with active voter registrations. Meanwhile, Utah just spent over a year and a quarter-million dollars reviewing its entire voter roll and found only 27 confirmed noncitizens out of 2 million voters.