New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s disclosure Wednesday {that a} software program glitch precipitated her state to mistakenly add 6,600 non-citizens to its voter rolls — and that about 400 of them improperly voted in recent times — has given Republicans one thing to seize onto of their long-running marketing campaign towards non-citizen voting.
President Donald Trump and others have argued the episode proves that non-citizen voting is an issue. And they’ve sought to make use of it to induce Congress to go the long-stalled “SAVE America Act,” which targets non-citizen voting, together with by making registrants present proof of citizenship.
But it’s necessary to delineate what the New Jersey state of affairs does and doesn’t imply about non-citizen voting.
Let’s break it down.
First, this is without doubt one of the most important disclosures of non-citizen registration and voting in years.
GOP claims about non-citizen registration and voting have often relied on false and exaggerated claims and speculation. But it is a state — and a blue one, at that — acknowledging that it occurred.
And it’s on a major scale — larger than other states in recent years.
Ohio’s Republican secretary of state in 2024 disclosed 597 possible cases of registered non-citizens, with 138 having forged ballots. A US district court docket discovered simply 39 non-citizens who registered to vote in Kansas between 1999 and 2013. Iowa’s secretary of state in 2024 spotlighted greater than 2,000 voter information for scrutiny, later discovering that 277 non-citizens were registered and 35 had cast ballots in 2024.
As in Iowa, opinions of voting information have usually featured massive numbers of doubtless problematic registrations — numbers usually touted by Republicans — with additional scrutiny considerably lowering the variety of instances.
The state of affairs in New Jersey appears to be like unhealthy, interval. In revealing the issue, Sherrill — a Democratic governor elected final yr — stated it was found and handled in 2024, underneath the earlier Democratic administration, however was by no means publicly disclosed.
Sherrill cited “reckless failures” underneath former Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration and stated it was “unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light.” (Murphy’s camp has not commented.)
If this drawback was certainly hidden, New Jersey’s leaders didn’t do something to fight claims about non-citizen voting. The state of affairs will additional gas claims that the issue is being coated up.
All of which provides Republicans and these crying foul about non-citizen voting some actual ammunition. New Jersey reveals that this generally is a drawback on a decently massive scale.
But it’s additionally necessary to notice what this episode doesn’t show.
Even although the New Jersey instance is bigger in scale, it’s nonetheless not quite a few votes that may matter in nearly any race.
The roughly 400 votes had been forged since 2023 — i.e. they weren’t multi functional election. And Sherrill stated the individuals had been “registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state.”
But even when the entire votes had been for one occasion or one other and had been forged in the identical election, there are only a few races they might have swung.
In the 2024 presidential election, New Jersey had greater than 2.2 million voters. Out of that whole, 400 votes can be about 0.018%.
The Pew Research Center in 2020 calculated that solely two states in historical past have featured presidential margins nearer than that — Maryland in 1832 (0.010%) and Florida in 2020 (0.009%).
Florida in 2020, after all, wound up mattering quite a bit; it decided who the president was. But once more, the votes in New Jersey weren’t multi functional election, and they didn’t essentially overwhelmingly favor one facet or the opposite.
But the bigger level is that New Jersey doesn’t neatly match into Republicans’ marketing campaign for tighter voter restrictions.
Yes, it reinforces that it’s potential for non-citizens to grow to be registered to vote and even to vote, underneath sure circumstances.
But it doesn’t show what Trump and his allies have usually cited, which is a deliberate and large-scale effort to rig elections for Democrats.
Even the comparatively bigger scale in New Jersey is considerably smaller than what the Trump administration has claimed. Using unclear strategies and unverified figures, the administration lately estimated that as many as 250,000 non-citizens had been registered to vote in 4 states alone, together with greater than 35,000 in New Jersey.
Trump has claimed that non-citizen voting is a scourge, and he has claimed thousands and thousands of unlawful votes had been forged in elections he misplaced.
But in accordance with what’s recognized about the New Jersey state of affairs, these individuals didn’t even try and register and/or commit voter fraud.
They disclosed that they had been non-citizens and, by the software program glitch, had been incorrectly registered to vote.
It appears potential a few of them had been then given data suggesting they may vote — like a voter registration card — and then did so, with out ever meaning to commit voter fraud.
All of which additionally means that the proof-of-citizenship requirement within the “SAVE America Act” wouldn’t have solved the issue, as a result of these individuals weren’t making an attempt to register and thus wouldn’t have been requested for documentation. The Trump administration claims that different points of the laws may root out such illegal registrations.
But Trump’s claims about large-scale vote-rigging utilizing undocumented immigrants have at all times suffered from a logic deficit. For it to make a distinction, enormous numbers of undocumented immigrants must be enlisted — undetected — and every of them would threat jail time simply to forged one poll.
What New Jersey appears to substantiate is that non-citizen voting can’t be fully dismissed, however it’s not occurring on a widespread foundation and appears extra accidentally than the rest.