New Jersey’s non-citizen voting reveal isn’t all it seems

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill announced Wednesday that a software glitch caused his state to crash 6,600 noncitizens mistakenly added to voter rolls — and that nearly 400 of them voted improperly in recent years — has given Republicans something to hold onto in their long-running campaign against noncitizen voting.

President Donald Trump and others have argued that this incident proves that noncitizen voting is a problem. And they tried to use that to encourage Congress to pass long-stalled legislation.”SAVE America Act“Targeting noncitizens to vote, including requiring those who register to provide proof of citizenship.”

But it is important to explain what the New Jersey situation does and does not mean regarding non-citizen voting.

Let’s break it down.

First, this is one of the most significant statements regarding non-citizen registration and voting in recent years.

GOP claims about non-citizen registration and voting regularly It was based on false and exaggerated claims and speculation. But this is a state of acknowledgment that this is happening, and it is a blue state.

And this is on a significant scale — larger other states in recent years.

Ohio’s 2024 Republican secretary of state announced 597 possible non-registered citizens cases138 people voted. The U.S. district court found only 39 noncitizens registered to vote in Kansas between 1999 and 2013. Iowa’s secretary of state reviewed more than 2,000 voter records in 2024 and later found: 277 non-citizens registered and 35 voted In 2024.

As in Iowa, reviews of voting records often include large numbers of potentially problematic records (these numbers are often touted by Republicans), and further review would significantly reduce the number of cases.

The situation in New Jersey looks bad, period. Sherrill, the Democratic governor elected last year, said in announcing the problem that the problem was discovered and resolved in 2024 under the previous Democratic administration but was never publicly disclosed.

Sherrill cited “reckless failures” in former Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration and said it was “unacceptable that no one from the previous administration brought this to light.” (Murphy’s side did not comment.)

If this problem is truly hidden, New Jersey leaders have done nothing to combat claims about citizens voting. This situation will further fuel the allegations that the problem is being covered up.

All of this gives real ammunition to Republicans and those who oppose non-citizen voting. New Jersey shows that this can be a problem on a fairly large scale.

But it is also important to pay attention to what this section does not show.

While the New Jersey example is larger in scale, this is not the number of votes that will matter in nearly every race.

Nearly 400 votes have been cast since 2023; So it wasn’t all in one election. Sherrill said people are “registered as Democratic, Republican and independent voters and are dispersed throughout the state.”

But even if all the votes were cast for one party or another and were cast in the same election, there are very few races in which the votes would change.

There were more than 2.2 million voters in New Jersey in the 2024 presidential election. Of that total, 400 votes would be approximately 0.018%.

Pew Research Center in 2020 calculated Only two states in history have had presidential margins closer than this: Maryland in 1832 (0.010%) and Florida in 2020 (0.009%).

In 2020, Florida has become quite important, of course; It determined who the president was. But again, the votes in New Jersey were not all in one election, nor were they necessarily overwhelmingly in favor of one party.

But the bigger point is that New Jersey doesn’t quite fit into the Republicans’ campaign for tighter voter restrictions.

Yes, it reinforces that it is possible Allowing non-citizens to vote and even register to vote under certain conditions.

But this does not indicate a deliberate, large-scale effort to rig Democrats’ elections that Trump and his allies have often cited.

Even the relatively larger scale in New Jersey is much smaller than the Trump administration claims. Using vague methods and unconfirmed figuresThe administration recently estimated that as many as 250,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in four states alone, including more than 35,000 in New Jersey.

Trump claimed that non-citizen voting was a scourge and alleged that millions of illegal votes were cast in the election he lost.

However, from what is known about the situation in New Jersey, these individuals did not even attempt to register and/or commit voter fraud.

They explained that they were not citizens and had mistakenly registered to vote due to a software bug.

It seems possible that some were later given information indicating they could vote, such as a voter registration card, and then did so without intending to commit voter fraud.

All this also shows that the proof of citizenship requirement in the “Save America Act” will not solve the problem because these people are not trying to register and therefore no documentation will be required. Trump administration allegations Other aspects of the legislation could root out such illegal recordings.

But Trump’s claims of large-scale vote rigging using undocumented immigrants have always been short on logic. For this to make a difference, large numbers of undocumented immigrants would need to be drafted into the military – undetected – and each of them would risk prison time just to cast one vote.

What New Jersey confirms is that the right of non-citizens to vote cannot be completely ignored, but it does not happen widely and seems more like a coincidence than anything else.

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