Democrats have spent years insisting noncitizen voting is a myth.
One state just blew that talking point apart in spectacular fashion.
And the number of illegal aliens with a documented history of casting ballots in this state’s elections is going to leave a lot of people demanding answers.
220 Noncitizens With a Voting History — And Counting
The administration of Democrat New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that 220 noncitizens had a history of voting in the state.
These noncitizens join 5,100 others who have been removed from voter rolls after it was revealed they were able to register to vote during an alleged computer glitch at the Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC).
Sherrill blamed a “glitch” in the MVC’s system that allowed 6,600 people to be registered as noncitizens while still being able to vote. The problem ran from June 2023 through June 2024 — squarely on the watch of her predecessor, former Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy.
A spokesperson for the software company used for the registration pushed back, saying that it had only followed the “design specifications as set out by the state,” allowing thousands of people to mark “no” for being a citizen while still marking “yes” to register to vote.
So the state blames the vendor. The vendor blames the state. And somewhere in the middle, hundreds of people who explicitly told the government they were not American citizens ended up on the voter rolls and, in many cases, actually casting ballots.
State officials also announced that approximately 340 of the 6,600 people had actually voted in at least one election, while many had a history of voting. In addition, county election officials will review registrations for nearly 1,450 people.
These registrations have already been temporarily marked as “rejected” in the state voter roll system but have not yet been deleted. Officials insist that this still prevents these individuals from casting ballots in any future elections until their investigations are complete.
That’s a lot of moving parts for something that was supposed to be impossible.
A Criminal Case That Landed Before the Scandal Even Broke
In early July, a 62-year-old noncitizen from Slovakia was also charged with illegally voting in an election and with making false statements while applying for U.S. citizenship.
That arrest came through the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, which has been running an Election Integrity Task Force. The task force is a coalition of federal law enforcement partners focused on preserving and protecting the integrity of elections conducted in the District of New Jersey.
FBI Director Kash Patel weighed in directly: “Securing our elections from criminal actors here at home and around the world is one of the top priorities for this FBI. Noncitizens voting is a federal crime — period — and while other administrations may have looked the other way in the past, those days are over.”
That last line is worth sitting with. Other administrations looked the other way. The current one is not.
Reporter Michael Casey, who has been following the case, put the stakes plainly: “There were elections in Jersey where Democrats have won by 1 vote. What further proof do we need that the SAVE America Act is desperately needed?”
Gov. Sherrill’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The SAVE Act, the White House, and the Bigger Picture
The White House did not stay quiet. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement that the New Jersey incident “underscores the absolute necessity of the SAVE America Act.” “Democrats and their media allies have repeatedly said it is impossible for noncitizens to register to vote, let alone cast a ballot. Time and again, they have been proven wrong,” Jackson said.
The SAVE Act requires states to use the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system to confirm citizenship before registering anyone to vote in federal elections, a safeguard New Jersey has refused to implement. The legislation also mandates voter ID for federal elections, a reform supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans, among other popular initiatives.
But the bill still has not cleared Congress. Trump supports passage of the bill but it has yet to clear Congress. Every week that passes without the SAVE Act becoming law is another week that states like New Jersey operate on the honor system — a system that just proved it cannot be trusted.
The Trump administration is suing New Jersey in federal court for access to the state’s unredacted voter rolls. New Jersey Republicans are calling for investigations and for an end to automatic voter registration at motor vehicle locations.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Committee on House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil (R-WI) have launched their own probe. Jordan and Steil wrote to New Jersey Lt. Governor Dale Caldwell for more information on the state’s compliance with federal laws surrounding elections.
In their letter, the Republicans noted: “The vendor, IDEMIA, that provided the software that Governor Sherrill alleges caused the noncitizens to be registered refuted Governor Sherrill’s claims, stating that New Jersey agencies were to blame.”
Sherrill, for her part, has tried to thread a needle that keeps getting thinner. She acknowledged the problem. She blamed her predecessor. She ordered investigations. And then she took a shot at the President.
Sherrill added, “Let me be clear: Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity.”
That line is going to age about as well as every previous Democrat assurance that noncitizen voting simply does not happen.
Sherrill said that her administration has “continued to move aggressively to fix the error” and protect the voting rights of her constituents. “I said we would conduct a thorough, complete, and fair investigation, and that is exactly what we are doing. Because that is what accountable government looks like,” she said before flipping it on the Republicans.
Accountable government would have been catching 6,600 illegal registrations before hundreds of noncitizens cast ballots. What New Jersey delivered was damage control.
What This Means Going Forward
The pattern here is not complicated. A state with automatic motor voter registration, no meaningful citizenship verification, and a vendor contract that apparently let people answer “no” to citizenship and still get registered — that state is now telling the country there is no systemic problem.
But 220 noncitizens with documented voting histories is not a glitch. It is a result. Systems produce results, and this one produced illegal ballots in elections where, as reporter Michael Casey noted, Democrats have won by a single vote.
The broader Democrat position on election integrity has always been that the safeguards are sufficient, that fraud is vanishingly rare, and that pushing for stricter verification is really just voter suppression wearing a different hat. New Jersey just made that argument significantly harder to sustain.
And the timing matters. The 2026 midterms are approaching. The SAVE Act is stalled. The Trump administration is in federal court trying to get access to voter rolls that New Jersey has been fighting to keep out of federal hands. The question worth asking is why a state government would resist transparency about its own voter registration data if everything was on the up and up.
Every illegal ballot cast cancels out the vote of a law-abiding American citizen. That is not a talking point — it is basic arithmetic. And right now, the arithmetic in New Jersey is not adding up.
Sources: The Daily Caller; The New Jersey Globe; WRNJ Radio; NJ.com; US Department of Justice, District of New Jersey; White House Press Office; House Judiciary Committee Republicans
