Trump seizes on New Jersey election error to boost misleading fraud claims | New Jersey

Donald Trump and his allies quickly captured 6,600 non-citizens registered to vote due to a software bug and fewer than 400 of them cast ballots, New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill announced Tuesday, using the statement to fuel false claims that there were large numbers of non-citizens on the voter rolls.

Trump seized on the news in his first speech as the Department of Homeland Security said it had identified 278,000 noncitizens in voter rolls in New Jersey and three other states. But a Guardian review of letters The report DHS sent to states shows the agency was less precise about the number and offered no explanation of its methodology.

In New Jersey since 2018 automatic voter registrationThis means that when someone interacts with a motor vehicle office, they are automatically registered to vote unless they opt out. Between 2023 and 2024, approximately 6,600 people registered to vote despite stating that they were not citizens. About 400 of those people voted, Sherrill said. Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. sent a letter He requested the names of those who registered and voted with Sherrill earlier this week, and the department reportedly notified him. think about cases. Sherrill proposed on Thursday The state said it would not turn over voter information and that it would not be fair to prosecute voters for a mistake that was the state’s fault earlier in the week.

That number represents a small fraction of the state’s more than 6.6 million registered voters. But within hours of the announcement, Trump and other election deniers boosted the number of people registered to vote because of the error, citing it as yet another data point that “illegals” were stealing the American election for Democrats.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said: “35,152 is the new number released by Homeland Security for non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey. These are just those caught. The actual numbers will turn out to be many times that amount. All Democrats!” Sherrill said Tuesday that the majority were mistakenly recorded as Democrats and Republicans with no party affiliation.

Experts say the incident is far from proof of the widespread fraud Republicans claim.

“This is not good, I don’t want to suggest otherwise. I don’t want to tell anyone that they’re stupid for thinking this is less than ideal. But this isn’t actually an example of what they’re talking about,” said Stephen Richer, a Republican who oversees elections in Arizona’s Maricopa County from 2021 to 2025. “These people were trying to do the right thing and admit that they were not citizens, and even though the vast majority of them were registered and probably [were] sent election mail materials, ignored it and did not vote.”

The number of noncitizens the state says are registered represents a “tiny fraction” of active registered voters in New Jersey in 2024, said David Becker, an election management expert and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “The number of potential votes cast from these inaccurate records would represent roughly 0.009% of all votes cast in the 2024 New Jersey general election, in which Kamala Harris defeated President Trump by more than 250,000 votes.

“While administrative errors like New Jersey’s occur occasionally, they are very rare and affect a very small portion of the electorate. The states charged with running our elections are in the best position to detect and correct these errors because they have access to significantly better data than the federal government,” he said.

The New Jersey voter rolls firestorm comes as Trump steps up his incendiary rhetoric about voting ahead of the midterm elections. Last week, in a primetime address from the White House, he offered what seemed like a dazzling statistic: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) found 278,000 noncitizens on record in just four states (California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey). This is also a misleading figure.

in it literature DHS was less specific about the 278,000 figure to election officials in those four states, saying it was a ceiling on the number of noncitizens who could be on the rolls. The agency also provided little or no explanation regarding its methodology for identifying noncitizens in identification records. States were given two weeks to respond.

“It’s a ridiculous letter,” Becker said. “Imagine if someone told you: ‘Some items in your refrigerator are poisonous. Write back in two weeks and tell us what you’re going to do about it.'” The first question a person would ask, Becker says, is “which items?”

“They’re not serious. They don’t even want states to keep accurate records. If they did, they’d be completely transparent, they’d take immediate action and say, we absolutely need you to do this.” “This was designed to create a false argument after the election that the election was stolen. This has nothing to do with cleaning up the rosters.”

The claim that non-citizens were registering was part of a series of misleading information Trump presented in a speech last week to undermine confidence in the US election system ahead of the November midterm elections, in which his party is expected to lose seats. It also comes as Republicans are pushing legislation that would impose new proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration; although many studies show that non-citizen voting is extremely rare.

Last week, Both Trump and homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin cited the 278,000 figure as evidence that states should share sensitive voter information with the federal government, and Mullin threatened potential prison time for those who did not comply. At least one Republican cited that number as a true example of voter fraud. “We know that approximately 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote. The last three presidential elections were decided by fewer votes,” said Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee senator. in question on Tuesday.

“We can confirm that we have apparently debunked these allegations. These numbers are wildly speculative at best, and the Department of Homeland Security has not shared anything supporting this,” said Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who serves as Nevada’s secretary of state. As of Wednesday afternoon, DHS had not provided Nevada with a list of noncitizen suspects in the state.

In a letter to New Jersey officials last week, DHS said as many as 35,152 noncitizens may be on the state’s voter rolls. The agency said it matched 19,497 voter registrations in its system with a non-citizen, but did not provide an explanation for the rest.

Sherrill said he was notified of the voter registration issue in his state and began investigating ahead of Trump’s speech Thursday evening. He said DHS provided no information to support its claims. “We’ve asked them for any evidence of this, where they got this number, who this is. We haven’t heard anything back yet,” he said on Tuesday.

Experts say understanding the methodology DHS uses is critical to assessing the veracity of claims. Matching records in different databases is difficult, and the system DHS uses to identify noncitizens – Systematic Alien Verification for Warrants (Record) – is quite complex. known to be error prone. Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor and election management expert, said DHS relied on publicly available voter information from four states to identify noncitizens, which likely lacked the level of detail needed to get a solid match between voter records and DHS data. Publish to Substack.

“DHS likely lacked the identifiers needed for high-quality matching. Registration checks often require name, date of birth, and a unique immigration or Social Security identifier, and public voter files do not normally include the most sensitive identifiers,” he wrote. “Anyone with experience in these data matching studies should expect these numbers to melt as fast as ice cream in Phoenix August.”

Although the agency claims there may be as many as 278,000 noncitizens in its records, DHS said in letters to states that it was able to match the names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers of about 118,000 people to a noncitizen in its system. The agency did not provide any explanation as to why it believes there are 160,000 more noncitizens on the books.

DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its methodology.

“I’m as confident as I can be that these numbers are not even remotely credible unless they come up with some magic data technique that no one has ever seen before,” Becker said. “I can’t tell you whether they’re making this up or not. Because they’re not transparent about it. And it’s possible they’re making this up, because we haven’t seen any methodology.”

Allegations of widespread non-citizen registration and voting start often The numbers often go down after a headline-grabbing statistic and then election officials investigate. In 2019, for example, Texas announced that it suspected nearly 100,000 noncitizens were on its rolls, 58,000 of whom may have voted. Later state accepted the claim It was based on bad data and agreed not to revoke anyone’s voter registration based on that.