Trump Overstates Magnitude of Noncitizen Voting in New Jersey 12%
By Robert Farley14%
8/5/2026, 2:35:39 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Anchoring Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 10.9% saturation with 222 hits. Analysis detected 1,659 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,046 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 21.3% and a BS Rank of 12% (27,057 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 88.50% of the article peer group.
New Jersey’s governor announced that “a software error” in the state’s motor vehicle registration system resulted in 6,600 noncitizens being improperly added to the state’s voter registration list.
The state’s preliminary investigation found that up to 400 votes were cast by noncitizens, far fewer than the “thousands of votes” claimed by President Donald Trump.
Trump has seized on the incident as validation of his longtime but unsupported claims about massive numbers of noncitizens voting.
“Well, you saw what happened, they caught thousands of votes in New Jersey where illegal aliens were allowed to vote,” Trump said on July 22, a day after New Jersey Gov.
Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, made the announcement.
“Thousands and thousands of votes.
They voted in favor of the transgender mutilization 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.”
Trump again cited the New Jersey case during a speech on July 27 when making a push for the SAVE America Act , which includes a photo ID requirement for voting and proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.
Election experts have said the bill’s specific requirements would make it difficult for some legitimate voters to cast a vote.
(New Jersey does not require photo ID at polling places, in most cases, but some form of identification is required if a voter does not voter does not provide valid ID at the time of registration.)
Despite the president’s advocacy, the SAVE America Act has stalled in the Senate.
“You read recently in New Jersey, where tremendous numbers of people were found out that they were on the voter rolls totally illegally, and that’s all over the country,” Trump said.
“That’s nothing compared to what’s going on in California and Minnesota and so many other states.”
Trump’s claim about rampant noncitizen voting around the country is unsupported .
As we have written , experts have found that voting in federal elections by noncitizens is relatively rare.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database has documented a little over 100 cases of noncitizens who have been convicted of illegally voting or registering to vote since 1982.
But let’s look at New Jersey, specifically, where Trump said “tremendous numbers” of noncitizens were found — “totally illegally” — on voter rolls.
The July 21 announcement by Sherrill represents a significant batch of noncitizen registration and voting.
But the number of votes was too small to change the outcome of any federal election in New Jersey.
To put the numbers in some perspective, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris beat Trump in New Jersey’s 2024 presidential race by more than 252,000 votes .
Even if all 400 noncitizens voted one way — and Sherrill noted “they were registered as Democrats, Republicans, and the majority unaffiliated, and were scattered across the state” — it would not have been enough to swing the presidential election.
“We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed,” Sherrill said.
Sherrill said that the noncitizens were inadvertently registered “through no fault of their own.”
We should note that Trump also called the noncitizens who voted in New Jersey “illegal aliens.”
We don’t know the legal status of those who were improperly registered to vote, nor of those who voted.
But about half of noncitizens living in the U.S. are estimated to be “unauthorized,” according to the Immigration Research Initiative .
In other words, about half of noncitizens in the U.S. are lawful permanent residents (green card holders) or temporary legal visa holders, such as workers and students.
In addition, “among people who are unauthorized are a very significant number who the government has given some protection from deportation,” the Immigration Research Initiative notes.
For example, many have pending asylum cases or have been extended Temporary Protected Status or humanitarian parole.
How Noncitizens Got on Voter Rolls
In her press conference on July 21, Sherrill said that she recently discovered that between June 2023 and June 2024 “a serious software error” in the state’s motor vehicle registration system led to 6,600 noncitizens being put on the state’s voter rolls.
“When New Jerseyans applied for a driver’s license or identification at the MVC [Motor Vehicle Commission], they were asked if they wanted to register to vote,” Sherrill said.
“In the case of this error, some individuals indicated that they weren’t citizens and weren’t eligible to vote, but the software registered them anyway.”
A voter casts their ballot at the Babbio Center on Nov. 5, 2024, in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Photo by Kena Betancur/Getty Images.
The contractor, IDEMIA, based in France, said its software performed according to state specifications.
“All 6,600 individuals indicated ‘Yes’ to wanting to register to vote and ‘No’ to being a US Citizen,” Lisa Shoemaker, IDEMIA’s senior vice president of global corporate relations, said in a statement reported by Politico .
“This information was recorded correctly and always available to the MVC via the database that MVC utilized to gather voter information and transmit to the Division of Elections.
At no point was a noncitizen ever marked as a citizen in the database.”
Shoemaker said that in June 2024 the MVC told IDEMIA to change its software so that people who indicated they were not citizens were not given the option to register to vote.
Sherrill said the state is replacing the vendor.
And she tapped an independent law firm, CSG Law, to investigate the issue.
The state’s Division of Elections — now more than two years after the issue was discovered by the MVC — “is working to ensure anyone who is illegally registered is removed from the voter rolls.”
“This entire situation is unacceptable,” Sherrill said, placing blame on IDEMIA, which she said “released software with such a glaring error,” as well as the MVC because it “took a year to get this issue fixed.”
She also blamed the previous administration of Democrat Phil Murphy.
“It’s unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light, demanded accountability, or took action when it happened years ago,” Sherrill said.
Murphy’s spokesperson said Murphy had no knowledge of the issue until Sherrill announced it on July 21.
Sherrill said the incident does not substantiate the president’s longstanding, but unsupported claims about massive noncitizen voting.
“Let me be clear: Donald Trump has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity,” Sherrill said.
“For the past 10 years, he’s cried wolf and peddled bizarre conspiracy theories about fraud with no evidence.”
David Becker , the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, agreed that the revelation about noncitizen voting in New Jersey is concerning, but he said it was important to contextualize it.
“You know, we’re going to hear from supporters of the president saying, ‘See, the Democrats said this never happened, and it happened.’
I don’t know anyone credible who says it’s never happened,” Becker said in a press conference on July 23.
“It just happens exceedingly rarely, and there’s no evidence it’s changing any elections whatsoever.”
Said Becker: “6,600 records in New Jersey is 0.1% of the total active voter registration list.
It’s not very much at all, and 400 voters … that is 0.009% of the total number of votes cast in 2024 in New Jersey in the November 2024 election.”
“There’s no evidence that this affected any election whatsoever,” Becker said.
“It’s an incredibly small amount, and it’s also spread out amongst parties: Republicans, Democrats, no party.
That was very clear from the press conference.
This does not support President Trump’s claims about noncitizen voting.
It largely does comport with his Department of Homeland Security’s conclusion that it’s extremely rare.”
Trump Says Number Registered Is Higher
Meanwhile, Trump said that the number of noncitizens registered to vote in New Jersey is much higher than the figure identified by Sherrill.
In a post on Truth Social after Sherrill’s announcement, Trump stated, “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.”
During his primetime address to the nation on July 16, Trump claimed that a Department of Homeland Security investigation “identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.”
A DHS document released by the White House claimed that a review of “public data files” in four states that have refused to share the private voter data with the government — California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada — found over 250,000 noncitizens illegally registered to vote.
According to a DHS press release issued on July 17, that included 35,152 in New Jersey.
Sherrill said the state received a letter from DHS about that claim.
“We have asked them for any evidence of this, where they got that number, who this is,” Sherrill said.
“We’ve received nothing back yet.”
Sherrill said if DHS “provides us any credible information, we will of course investigate it as we do with every piece of information that we have.”
But Sherrill said she thinks the figure is part of Trump’s “ongoing misinformation” about election fraud.
Officials in California, Nevada and Pennsylvania also responded to the DHS letter demanding more transparency about how DHS derived its figures.
“That number has no credibility whatsoever until DHS shares their methodology on that number,” Becker said.
“What they’re also saying is that they matched the data they had from the states, which was only the public voter file, with no unique identifiers, no personally identifiable information, to some other data source, possibly commercial, and made conclusions about citizenship status on that,” Becker said in a press conference.
“There’s no way that anyone can make a confident match on that.
There’s too many challenges.
There are data entry errors.
There’s fuzzy name matching.
There’s junior and senior problems.
There’s so many problems that it is almost designed to create a huge number of false positives.”
New Jersey Refusing to Share Names
Calling the voting by 400 noncitizens “unacceptable and illegal,” Harmeet Dhillon, a federal assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote to Sherrill demanding that New Jersey provide prosecutors with the name, address, date of birth and nationalities of the 6,600 noncitizens added to the state voter rolls as well as the names of those who voted (including when and where they voted).
On a podcast, Dhillon said those who voted could face deportation or criminal charges.
Sherrill said she won’t provide the information requested by DOJ.
“We now have certain people that, through no fault of their own, have been registered to vote,” Sherrill said at her July 21 press conference .
“It may imperil their immigration status,” she said.
“It may imperil different things.
We are working very hard to protect them, but that is the responsibility of the people that worked for the MVC that knew that this was going on and did nothing to remedy it — that’s wrong.
It would be really the utmost in hypocrisy for the state to charge them when it’s our fault.
However, I would not put it past the federal government.
So we are working very hard on ways in which we can protect people here in the state of New Jersey.
We are not in the practice of releasing personally identifying information to the federal government right now, given that the Trump administration continues to weaponize it against people.”
When Sherrill sent Dhillon a formal letter indicating that New Jersey would not provide the identifying information requested, Dhillon responded via X , “DOJ will get this information through all legal means!”
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