Trump allies seize on New Jersey registration error to advance anti-voting agenda

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) announced Tuesday that a software failure improperly registered roughly 6,600 people who told the Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC) they were not U.S. citizens.

Nothing disclosed so far shows an organized voter fraud scheme or an altered election. But, surprising no one, Republicans and Trump officials jumped on the error, with the Department of Justice announcing a civil rights probe and the White House demanding passage of the SAVE America Act.

In a letter to Sherrill, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon demanded the full names, dates of birth, nationalities, residential addresses and registration details of all roughly 6,600 people, along with information about when and where the fewer than 400 affected individuals voted. For any mail-in ballots, the department also requested the accompanying certification and signature.

The letter directs New Jersey to preserve all records related to the disclosure and says DOJ will notify the federal court overseeing its pending voter roll lawsuit against the state.

Sherrill said the error occurred between June 2023 and June 2024, when people applying for driver’s licenses or identification cards were asked on a keypad whether they were U.S. citizens. Roughly 6,600 answered “no,” but the MVC’s software registered them anyway.

The state’s preliminary review found that fewer than 400 of those people subsequently voted in at least one election. Officials have not identified the elections, disclosed the exact number of ballots cast or said whether every affected person was still a noncitizen when they voted.

“We are actively working to remove those less than 400 voters from the rolls,” Sherrill said. “We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed.”

Sherill said the episode has no link to a separate, unsupported allegation from the Department of Homeland Security that as many as 35,152 noncitizens may be registered in New Jersey. Sherrill said the state asked DHS for the identities and evidence behind that number but has received nothing.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said state officials are better equipped than the federal government to identify and correct errors involving their own voter records.

“While administrative errors such as New Jersey’s do infrequently occur, they are very rare and affect a very small fraction of voters,” Becker said. “The states entrusted to run our elections are best positioned to detect and correct these errors, as they have access to substantially better data than the federal government.”

Still, within hours, President Donald Trump’s allies and Republican officials began presenting the MVC failure as vindication for their broader claims that noncitizen voting is widespread. The White House and Trump’s political account said Congress must pass the SAVE America Act, a sweeping Republican proposal that would impose strict proof-of-citizenship and photo ID requirements on voters, among other anti-voting measures.

Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters similarly claimed Sherrill “admitted what the RNC and NJGOP uncovered” through earlier public records requests, although the party did not establish that its previous list involved the same people or the same software error.

“Democrats keep claiming this never happens, yet every new discovery tells the same old story,” Gruters said. “Enough excuses. Pass the SAVE America Act and ensure only American citizens are voting in American elections.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin paired the software disclosure with DHS’ unsubstantiated 35,152-person estimate.

“Just ONE illegal vote cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen,” Mullin wrote. “Looking forward to working with you to secure your elections in the future.”

Dhillon also suggested that New Jersey could have avoided the problem by complying with the Justice Department’s demand for its unredacted statewide voter file, writing that the state was refusing to allow DOJ to help prevent “exactly such ‘errors.’”

The claim hardly vindicates the DOJ’s attempted overreach or Dhillon’s sweeping conclusions, however. The department is 0-16 and 0-1 on appeal, with no court ordering a state to surrender its unredacted voter file.

The failure was not caused by thousands of people falsely claiming to be citizens. 

According to New Jersey, residents gave the correct answer and the government’s software disregarded it. The incident is evidence of a severe breakdown in software, vendor oversight and government accountability — not, based on anything released so far, a coordinated effort to infiltrate an election.

Also lost in the GOP outrage is the issue of scale. New Jersey reported 6,682,699 registered voters and 4,321,921 ballots cast in the 2024 general election. The approximately 6,600 erroneous registrations amounted to about  one-tenth of 1%, or 0.0001%, of the state’s registered electorate for that election alone. The fewer than 400 affected people who voted would be even more microscopic, representing less than one-hundredth of 1% of the number of ballots cast in that election, though the state has said the voting occurred across multiple elections and has not disclosed how many total ballots those individuals cast.

“As CEIR’s own research affirms, noncitizen registration remains extremely rare, and noncitizen voting is infinitesimally rare,” Becker added. “The number of potential ballots cast from those incorrect registrations would represent roughly 0.009% of all ballots cast in New Jersey’s 2024 general election, when Kamala Harris defeated President Trump by more than 250,000 votes. Joe Biden actually defeated Trump by a margin three times as large before this error took place.”

That context why the incident is not proof of the mass noncitizen voting Trump has alleged for years.

A recent Reuters investigation published this week found just 129 federal prosecutions under the nation’s noncitizen-voting law since it took effect in 1996, with 73 convictions or guilty pleas. The review found no evidence of coordinated fraud and found that many cases involved legal residents who were confused about their eligibility, received inaccurate information or were caught up in administrative errors. 

Republicans are nevertheless using New Jersey’s disclosure to revive the SAVE America Act. The legislation would require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration and impose new photo ID requirements for federal elections. It stalled in the Senate, though Republicans continue pursuing versions of the proposal.

The argument that even one unlawful vote justifies those restrictions ignores the other side of the equation: the eligible citizens who would have difficulty producing the documents the legislation demands and who would ultimately be disenfranchised in an attempt to respond to an exceptionally rare issue.

“We often hear lawmakers making the argument that these laws are justified regardless of scale or impact,” Lauren Kunis, executive director of VoteRiders, previously told Democracy Docket. “But these lawmakers are ignoring the dire consequences of these laws on eligible U.S. citizens, who will dramatically and disproportionately bear the brunt of these restrictions relative to the exceedingly rare and almost-always accidental cases of noncitizen voting that are cited to justify their passage.”