WASHINGTON — An independent fact-checker says President Donald Trump has overstated the magnitude of noncitizen voting in New Jersey.
Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, took exception to Trump’s comments on July 22, a day after Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that 6,600 noncitizens were mistakenly registered to vote due to what she called a software error in the state’s motor vehicle registration system. About 400 of them actually cast ballots.
The group was the second independent observer to downplay the impact of noncitizen voters in the state following Sherrill’s announcement.
David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights lawyer who now heads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, earlier said that the 6,600 noncitizens accounted for just .1% of the state’s registration list and the 400 people who erroneously cast ballots totaled .009% of the total votes in the 2024 election.
Trump has seized on the error to push for his SAVE America Act, which would impose new restrictions on registering and voting. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school estimated that the bill could disenfranchise 21 million legal voters, who could not quickly get their hands on the documents needed to register and vote..
“Well, you saw what happened, they caught thousands of votes in New Jersey where illegal aliens were allowed to vote,” Trump said. “Thousands and thousands of votes. They voted in favor of the transgender mutilation of your children and in favor of — in favor of men playing in women’s sports. Isn’t that lovely? They voted against lower energy prices, lower car prices, and bigger paychecks for everyone. They voted against every one of these things.”
In addition, Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who tried to overturn the 2020 election, House Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wisconsin), and Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) have begun looking at New Jersey’s voting procedures.
Factcheck said the claim was “unsupported” and that the number of votes cast was “too small to change the outcome of any federal election in New Jersey,” even though the number of noncitizen registrations and votes was “a significant batch.”
Studies have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare. A separate Brennan Center study found that of 23.5 million votes overseen by election officials in the 2016 elections, just 30 votes might have been cast by noncitizens. That comes out to 0.0001% of the votes cast.
Speaking to reporters after Sherrill’s announcement, Becker called the erroneous registrations in New Jersey “a glitch.”
“If you don’t have the glitch, the number is much smaller,” Becker said. “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.”