At a divided and depressing time in the country, there’s a bit of quiet good news on voting. It comes in an unexpected place.

Louisiana politics has long stirred a rich gumbo of tall tales and wild rumors. “When I die, bury me in Louisiana,” quipped Gov. Earl Long. “I want to stay involved in politics.” The political culture winked at chicanery. When Klansman David Duke ran for governor against Edwin Edwards in 1991, the incumbent’s bumper stickers read, “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important.” Edwards won. (Later, he went to prison.)

So it was noteworthy when Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry this month presented the results of a study on the election falsehood du jour: that noncitizens are voting in large numbers. Flanked by sober-suited officials, she announced that a grand total of 79 possible noncitizens had voted in the state over the last 40 years. By comparison, my colleagues Gabriella Sanchez and Kevin Morris estimate, more than 74 million votes were cast in the state over those four decades. Noncitizens represented an infinitesimal proportion of those votes.

And Landry acknowledged that she couldn’t even be sure that those 79 were actual cases of ineligible votes being cast — some may have been incorrectly identified as a result of data errors or outdated information. “I want to be clear: Noncitizens illegally registering or voting is not a systemic problem in Louisiana,” Landry declared.

Well, yes. That is consistent with every bit of evidence in every state across the country. Only citizens can vote, and with few exceptions, only citizens do vote. States have a number of systems in place to ensure that only citizens vote. As Landry said, “I take great pride in the steps our office takes to maintain accurate voter rolls.”

Rare as it may be, any intentional instance of noncitizen voting is wrong. Louisiana has contacted those individuals to seek proof of their citizenship, and individuals could be prosecuted if they indeed registered or voted while ineligible. But the phenomenon is vanishingly rare, as our studies have shown. Don’t take our word for it: The libertarian Cato Institute, funded by the Koch brothers, confirms: “Noncitizens Don’t Illegally Vote in Detectable Numbers.”

So why the big investigation? And why did the Louisiana legislature just last year pass a law requiring “proof of citizenship” to register and vote? (The League of Women Voters and others are now challenging that law in court.)

Indeed, Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson serves as speaker of the House. He has pressed for federal legislation called the SAVE Act, which would require Americans to produce a document like a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers to register and vote. Our research shows that at least 21 million American citizens lack ready access to that paperwork. That number does not even count the millions of women whose married names no longer match the names on their birth certificates. (About half of Americans simply don’t have a passport.)

The SAVE Act would be the most restrictive voting law passed by Congress in generations, all to solve a problem now shown to not even exist in the speaker’s own state. Johnson himself has acknowledged as much. When he backed the proposal, he explained that “we all know intuitively” it must be happening. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable.”

Now his own state’s chief election official, of his own party, has rebutted that “intuition.”

These wild claims of misconduct are being deployed to justify restrictive voting policies. Earlier this year, President Trump illegally tried to seize control of the nation's election system in an executive order that required a passport (not even a birth certificate) to register. We sued, and a federal court blocked the order. The Justice Department has demanded voter records from at least 27 states. And partisans are pushing for mass purges of the voter rolls, a practice that would inevitably stop many eligible citizens from casting a ballot. These false claims stir nativist fear of immigrants, who are already under assault by an often abusive federal government drive for mass deportation.

All this combines to discredit our elections and undermine public trust in the results.

It may be too much to hope that this reassuring announcement in Louisiana will change many minds. Don’t expect anti-voting activists to sheepishly mutter, “Oh, never mind.” Certainly, we’re girding for a hard fight to ensure that we have free and fair elections in 2026.

But it is a reminder that American elections, despite the rumors, are in fact safe and secure. That voters can cast ballots with confidence. At a time when violence threatens to spiral, when political leaders fan division, it may be possible to fight fear with facts.