Donald Trump and his allies quickly seized on an announcement from New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill on Tuesday that 6,600 noncitizens had been registered to vote due to a software error, with fewer than 400 actually casting ballots. They used the disclosure to escalate false claims of widespread noncitizen voting.
Trump's Response and Republican Legislation
Trump posted on Truth Social: "35,152 is the new number just released by Homeland Security of non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey. These are just the ones that got caught. The real numbers will prove to be many times this amount. They are all Dumocrats!" However, Sherrill noted that both Democrats and Republicans were erroneously registered, with the majority unaffiliated with a party.
The incident comes as Republicans push legislation imposing new proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration, despite studies showing noncitizen voting is extremely rare.
Expert Analysis of the Numbers
Stephen Richer, a Republican who oversaw elections in Maricopa County, Arizona, from 2021 to 2025, said: "These people were trying to do the right thing and acknowledge that they're not citizens, and then the vast majority of them, even though registered and presumably sent election mail materials, ignored that and didn't vote."
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, noted that the 6,600 registrations represent a "minuscule fraction" of New Jersey's active registered voters. The potential ballots cast from those incorrect registrations would be roughly 0.009% of all ballots cast in the 2024 general election, where Kamala Harris defeated Trump by over 250,000 votes.
DHS's Dubious Methodology
The firestorm escalated after Trump claimed in a primetime speech that the Department of Homeland Security had identified 278,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in four states: California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. However, a Guardian review of DHS letters to those states revealed less certainty, with the agency calling 278,000 a ceiling and offering no explanation of its methodology.
Becker likened the DHS letter to someone saying: "Some of the items in your fridge are poisonous. Write us back in two weeks and tell us what you're going to do about that." He added: "This is designed to create a false argument post-election that the election was stolen."
Experts emphasize that matching records across databases is difficult, and DHS's System Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) is error-prone. Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor, wrote that DHS likely lacked identifiers for high-quality matching, predicting the numbers would "melt as quickly as ice cream in a Phoenix August."
Political Implications and Historical Context
Claims of widespread noncitizen voting often start with headline-grabbing statistics that later whittle down. In 2019, Texas claimed nearly 100,000 noncitizens on its rolls, later admitting the data was flawed. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said: "We can affirm that on its face, we refute these claims. These numbers are wildly speculative at best."
The DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment on its methodology. Becker concluded: "I am about as certain as I can be... that these numbers cannot be even remotely credible. What I can't tell you is whether they just made them up."
