Citing N.J. voting glitch, U.S. House to vote again on supporting voting restrictions

WASHINGTON — When the House returns from its August recess this week, Republicans once again will demand new voting restrictions, citing New Jersey’s voter registration glitch as a reason for the legislation. 

The House is scheduled to vote on legislation calling for passage of the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register and require a specific voter ID to cast a ballot. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law has said as many as  21.3 million U.S. citizens couldn’t quickly get their hands on the required documents, including 3.8 million whose papers were lost, stolen or destroyed.

Independent studies have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare. The Brennan Center, 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’s 0.0001%.

President Donald Trump repeatedly has demanded that Congress enact the legislation, only to be rebuffed by Senate Republicans who have been unable to garner the 60 votes needed to clear that chamber, or even the 51 votes needed to repeal the filibuster. The GOP-controlled House has voted along party lines four times in support of the measure.

The resolution to be brought to the House floor specifically cites the recent glitch in New Jersey, where a software error led to around 6,600 noncitizens being registered to vote. Fewer than 400 residents who were mistakenly registered to vote cast ballots, the state said last month.

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

“The SAVE America Act would do nothing to improve election integrity, and could possibly harm it,” Becker told the New Jersey Globe. “While New Jersey reported human error and a workflow problem that resulted in a few thousand potential non-citizens being added to the voter rolls, very few of them voted, and the SAVE act would do nothing to prevent these rare errors.”

Becker added: “In fact, it could exacerbate the problem, by moving the responsibility to collect citizenship information from the 50 states, to creating a vast new unfunded bureaucracy where this data would be collected in nearly 10,000 local jurisdictions, vastly expanding the potential for technical problems and human error.”

But Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) wrote in a New Jersey Globe op-ed Monday that the state’s registration errors provided another argument for  the SAVE America Act.

“This fight is bigger than one state or one election. It is about making sure Americans can trust that our elections are secure and that every citizen has confidence that his or her lawful vote matters,” Van Drew wrote.

“Republicans have been sounding the alarm for years about weaknesses in voter-registration systems, inadequate voter-roll maintenance, and the risk that noncitizens may be registered and permitted to vote in federal elections,” he wrote. “New Jersey’s admission demonstrates that these vulnerabilities are real and that even systems supposedly designed to screen out ineligible applicants can fail on a massive scale.”

The resolution also condemns socialism “in all its forms,” and singles out the Democratic Socialists of America, which has seen several of its candidates defeating more moderate candidates in primary elections this year.

House Democrats who vote no because they oppose the new voting restrictions can expect to face Republican accusations in that they support socialism. 

But socialism doesn’t show up anywhere among Americans’ concerns in advance of the 2026 midterm elections, according to a Pew Research Center poll of registered voters released last month. Their top concern is the economy, according to the Pew poll, and 60% of those surveyed said Trump’s policies have made things worse.