Legacy media’s embarrassing feeding frenzy on New Jersey voter registration error

New Jersey’s voter registration system is a “mess,” with “little to stop noncitizens from registering to vote if they want to,” according to an alarming-sounding new Politico story. 

The report is Politico’s ninth on the subject — including leading today’s “New Jersey Playbook” — in the nine days since the state announced that a software glitch had led to around 6,600 noncitizens being added to the rolls in error. It called that news “stunning.”

It isn’t just Politico. The legacy media writ large has pounced on the story of New Jersey’s voter registration error, and each new Republican announcement of an investigation, or call for an even wider investigation, has given it new momentum. 

“Republicans were quick to ridicule Democrats over the error,” Axios reported, “while the White House again framed it as evidence that proof of citizenship legislation must pass.”

“NJ illegal voting scandal explodes,” Fox News added Wednesday. 

Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) is now “in the hot seat,” according to the New York Times.

To be clear, a state admitting that several hundred ineligible voters cast ballots deserves attention, so that election administrators in New Jersey and elsewhere can continue to reduce errors. 

But the volume and tone of the news coverage have been embarrassingly out of proportion to the scale of the issue. That’s especially true, as we noted Tuesday, when compared to the shrugging response from the media to the news that California rejected nearly 150,000 mail ballots. Nearly all were likely cast by eligible voters, leaving Americans disenfranchised.

Thursday’s Politico story is among the most misleading. It goes on to explain that news of the error “is likely to exacerbate” far-right conspiracy theories claiming Sherrill’s win last year, by a margin of around 479,000 votes, was down to voter fraud. 

Politico seems to know it should pour water on those false theories — but it’s afraid to do so unequivocally. So it quotes a Republican consultant who says having illegitimate voters on the rolls “opens the door to fraud,” but “probably not” at a level that could have swayed that race. 

“I think there’s some fraud, where people are intentionally trying to game or cheat the system,” the GOP consultant says, offering no evidence. “Do I think it exists on a level of millions or hundreds of thousands of people? Probably not. But the problem is that the system is so laissez faire when it comes to registration and checking this stuff.”

Responsible, informed reporting, of course, would not for a moment entertain the idea that there were nearly half a million undetected fraudulent votes in last year’s election for New Jersey governor. It would clearly tell readers that it’s bonkers. 

And it would avoid conflating the issue of ineligible voters on the rolls with the key question of ineligible votes cast. That conflation leaves readers with the overall impression that even if illegal voting didn’t occur at a scale large enough to tip the governor’s race, it’s still a huge concern that urgently needs addressing. Maybe there weren’t hundreds of thousands or millions of such votes cast, a reader might come away thinking, but there might have been tens of thousands.

This is false, of course. The state has said it found fewer than 400 votes cast by noncitizens, and no evidence has emerged to contradict that. 

Had the story consulted a national expert on election administration, it might have gotten a better grasp on the scale of the issue. Here’s what one of the most prominent and knowledgeable, David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, has said about the New Jersey error: 

“This is a tiny blip. They’re trying to use a nuclear bomb to kill an ant. This is not a problem facing American elections right now.”

You wouldn’t know it from reading much of the mainstream press.

Correction: The photo accompanying this story originally showed Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) of Virginia. We regret the error.