White House seizes on N.J. voter registration error to push SAVE America Act

WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday seized on reports that a software error led to around 6,600 noncitizens being registered in New Jersey to push for legislation requiring universal voter ID and proof of citizenship for all registered voters.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill said in a statement that less than 400 residents who were mistakenly registered to vote cast ballots.

The error, which occurred from June 2023 to June 2024, comes as President Donald Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Congress to enact his top legislative priority, the SAVE America Act, including pushing for the bill in a prime-time address last week.

“This latest incident underscores the absolute necessity of the SAVE America Act,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to the New Jersey Globe. “American voters deserve to have confidence that our elections are safe and secure — President Trump will never stop fighting to make that happen and all patriotic Americans should join in his effort.”

The measure does not have enough support to clear the Senate, as Republicans are short of the 60 votes needed to overcome Democratic opposition and are unable to garner enough support on their side to change the filibuster rules blocking the bill’s passage.

“Democrats and their media allies have repeatedly said it is impossible for noncitizens to register to vote, let alone cast a ballot,” Jackson said. “Time and again, they have been proven wrong. As President Trump has said, there is nothing more important than the integrity of our elections.”

And Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters added his voice to the demand that Congress pass Trump’s voting legislation.

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

The erroneous registrations represented 0.1% of the state’s active voters and the ballots represented 0.009% of the votes cast in the 2024 general election, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“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.”

“Noncitizen registration remains extremely rare, and noncitizen voting is infinitesimally rare,” he added.

Sherrill said those mistakenly registered to vote would be removed from the voter rolls, as she criticized Trump for continuing to maintain that the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden was stolen. The Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council — composed of federal and state agencies, including Trump administration officials, called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”Independent studies have shown that voting by noncitizens is rare and that millions of Americans could lose the right to vote because they couldn’t quickly get their hands on the required documents should the legislation become law.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, for example, reported that just 30 of 23.5 million votes overseen by election officials in the 2016 elections might have been cast by noncitizens. That comes out to 0.0001% of the votes cast.

A separate Brennan Center found that 21.3 million U.S. citizens couldn’t quickly get their hands on the documents, including 3.8 million whose papers were lost, stolen or destroyed.

“Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity,” Sherrill said. “For more than 10 years, he has worked to undermine Americans’ faith in our elections by spreading lies about legitimate election results, attempting to overturn a free and fair election, encouraging an attack on our Capitol when he couldn’t accept the will of the voters, and defunding election security at the federal level.”