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New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s disclosure Wednesday that a software glitch caused her state to mistakenly add 6,600 non-citizens to its voter rolls — and that about 400 of them improperly voted in recent years — has given Republicans something to grab onto in their long-running campaign against non-citizen voting.
President Donald Trump and others have argued the episode proves that non-citizen voting is a problem. And they’ve sought to use it to urge Congress to pass the long-stalled “SAVE America Act,” which targets non-citizen voting, including by making registrants provide proof of citizenship.
But it’s important to delineate what the New Jersey situation does and doesn’t mean about non-citizen voting.
Let’s break it down.
First, this is one of the most significant disclosures of non-citizen registration and voting in years.
GOP claims about non-citizen registration and voting have regularly relied on false and exaggerated claims and speculation. But this is a state — and a blue one, at that — acknowledging that it happened.
And it’s on a significant scale — bigger 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 cast ballots. A US district court found just 39 non-citizens who registered to vote in Kansas between 1999 and 2013. Iowa’s secretary of state in 2024 spotlighted more than 2,000 voter records for scrutiny, later finding that 277 non-citizens were registered and 35 had cast ballots in 2024.
As in Iowa, reviews of voting records have often featured large numbers of potentially problematic registrations — numbers often touted by Republicans — with further scrutiny significantly reducing the number of cases.
The situation in New Jersey looks bad, period. In revealing the problem, Sherrill — a Democratic governor elected last year — said it was discovered and dealt with in 2024, under the previous Democratic administration, but was never publicly disclosed.
Sherrill cited “reckless failures” under former Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration and said it was “unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light.” (Murphy’s camp has not commented.)
If this problem was indeed hidden, New Jersey’s leaders didn’t do anything to combat claims about non-citizen voting. The situation will further fuel claims that the problem is being covered up.
All of which gives Republicans and those crying foul about non-citizen voting some real ammunition. New Jersey shows that this can be a problem on a decently large scale.
But it’s also important to note what this episode doesn’t demonstrate.
Even though the New Jersey example is larger in scale, it’s still not a number of votes that would matter in virtually any race.
The roughly 400 votes were cast since 2023 — i.e. they weren’t all in one election. And Sherrill said the people were “registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state.”
But even if all of the votes were for one party or another and were cast in the same election, there are very few races they would have swung.
In the 2024 presidential election, New Jersey had more than 2.2 million voters. Out of that total, 400 votes would be about 0.018%.
The Pew Research Center in 2020 calculated that only two states in history have featured presidential margins closer than that — Maryland in 1832 (0.010%) and Florida in 2020 (0.009%).
Florida in 2020, of course, wound up mattering quite a lot; it determined who the president was. But again, the votes in New Jersey weren’t all in one election, and they didn’t necessarily overwhelmingly favor one side or the other.
But the larger point is that New Jersey doesn’t neatly fit into Republicans’ campaign for tighter voter restrictions.
Yes, it reinforces that it’s possible for non-citizens to become registered to vote and even to vote, under certain circumstances.
But it doesn’t demonstrate what Trump and his allies have often cited, which is a deliberate and large-scale effort to rig elections for Democrats.
Even the relatively larger scale in New Jersey is significantly smaller than what the Trump administration has claimed. Using unclear methods and unverified figures, the administration recently estimated that as many as 250,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in four states alone, including more than 35,000 in New Jersey.
Trump has claimed that non-citizen voting is a scourge, and he has claimed millions of illegal votes were cast in elections he lost.
But according to what’s known about the New Jersey situation, these people didn’t even attempt to register and/or commit voter fraud.
They disclosed that they were non-citizens and, through the software glitch, were incorrectly registered to vote.
It seems possible some of them were then given information suggesting they could vote — like a voter registration card — and then did so, without ever intending to commit voter fraud.
All of which also suggests that the proof-of-citizenship requirement in the “SAVE America Act” wouldn’t have solved the problem, because these people weren’t trying to register and thus wouldn’t have been asked for documentation. The Trump administration claims that other aspects of the legislation could root out such unlawful registrations.
But Trump’s claims about large-scale vote-rigging using undocumented immigrants have always suffered from a logic deficit. For it to make a difference, huge numbers of undocumented immigrants would have to be enlisted — undetected — and each of them would risk prison time just to cast one ballot.
What New Jersey seems to confirm is that non-citizen voting can’t be completely dismissed, but it’s not happening on a widespread basis and seems more by accident than anything else.
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