What to know about noncitizens voting in New Jersey

Less than a week after President Donald Trump addressed the nation to declare without evidence that U.S. elections aren’t free and fair, New Jersey said that officials mistakenly registered 6,600 apparent noncitizens to vote over the course of a year in 2023 and 2024 because of a software error. An initial review found that fewer than 400 of them later voted.

The White House jumped on this news to try to get Congress to pass voting restrictions, but election experts say this batch of noncitizens voting, while relatively large, doesn’t further Trump’s false claims that there is widespread voter fraud.

“This was a software error that was corrected, not a systemic problem,” said Wendy Weiser with the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on democracy issues.

Here’s what to know about what happened.

New Jersey, like several other states, allows undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses. When they do, they check a box verifying they are not citizens. But somewhere along the line in 2023, about 6,600 noncitizens were mistakenly classified as citizens who were then eligible to vote, said New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) on Tuesday. (She wasn’t governor at the time.) Of those, about 400 cast ballots over the next year until the mistake was caught and corrected.

“I am appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen and the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time,” Sherrill said in a social media post.

Sherill said there is no evidence that any elections were swayed. In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris won New Jersey by more than 250,000 votes.

“We will be looking at different possibilities of making our elections more secure going forward,” she said.

“Democrats and their media allies have repeatedly said it is impossible for noncitizens to register to vote, let alone cast a ballot,” a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, told the New York Times. “American voters deserve to have confidence that our elections are safe and secure.”

The upshot: Very little other than an error that a state caught and is taking seriously, say election experts.

Experts maintain — and studies support — that noncitizen voting is still rare. It’s illegal to vote in U.S. elections unless you’re a citizen, and states have guardrails in place to prevent noncitizens from trying to do so.

When anyone applies for an ID or driver’s license, federal law says they must also provide proof of residence, which almost always makes clear whether they are a citizen. Undocumented immigrants living in states that allow them to apply for licenses have to provide their foreign documentation. In New Jersey, it seems that those noncitizen voters accurately reported their citizenship, and the system mistakenly registered them as voters anyway.

“This happens sometimes, rarely, due to administrative and technical problems,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney and head of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “But it’s very rare, affects very few, and the states discover it using their substantially better data on voters compared to the federal government.”

Trump has spent the better part of this year trying to get Congress to dramatically change how people vote in November, saying it would “guarantee the midterms” for Republicans.

He wants to ban mail voting, require people to prove they are citizens when registering to vote and present photo identification to vote, among other provisions. Some of those ideas are politically popular, and he’s claimed the only opponents to his voting bill are those “who want to cheat.”

But nonpartisan and even some Republican election experts have said the extra documentation is unnecessary and potentially even disenfranchising, even taking into consideration what happened in New Jersey. Millions of Americans register to vote every year, and they are already required to verify they are citizens when they do.

Under Trump’s Save America Act, those who move to a different state or change their names, including after a marriage or divorce, would have to reregister with a passport, marriage certificate or other documentation. Over half of Americans don’t have passports, and not all Americans have copies of their birth certificates.

“The premise of the Save Act is we need to ensure there are processes that confirm citizenship,” Matt Germer, director of the governance program at the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank, said in an interview as the House passed a version of this bill earlier this year that has since stalled in the Senate. “But I think much of the burden of citizenship verification should be on the government, which holds much of this data in the first place.”

Those changes wouldn’t be impenetrable. Mistakes still happen, say experts, as New Jersey proved.

“The Save Act would not have prevented what happened in New Jersey,” Weiser said. “It was a software glitch.”

Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.