Within days of a Department of Homeland Security announcement, Republican leaders amplified claims that thousands of noncitizens voted illegally in New Jersey, framing it as evidence of widespread election fraud. The reality is far messier and the numbers far smaller than the rhetoric suggests.
New Jersey discovered that a software glitch during automatic voter registration had enrolled 6,600 noncitizens between 2023 and 2024. Of those, fewer than 400 actually cast ballots. The error occurred because the state's motor vehicle bureau system failed to properly flag individuals who declared themselves non-citizens when applying for licenses.
Donald Trump seized on the disclosure to amplify a larger claim. He posted on Truth Social that the Department of Homeland Security had identified 35,152 noncitizens on New Jersey's rolls, then inflated that further by suggesting the real number was much higher. Other Republicans cited the broader DHS figure of 278,000 noncitizens across four states, using it to justify calls for stricter voter identification laws.
Election experts push back hard against this interpretation. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, noted that the actual votes cast from the erroneous registrations represented roughly 0.009 percent of all ballots cast in New Jersey's 2024 general election, in which Kamala Harris defeated Trump by more than 250,000 votes.
"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. He added that states are far better positioned than the federal government to detect and correct these mistakes because they have access to superior data.
The broader DHS claim itself rests on shaky ground. The agency told four states it had identified up to 278,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls but provided almost no methodological transparency. In letters to election officials, DHS described the 278,000 as a ceiling, not a confirmed count, and offered two weeks for states to respond without clarifying how it arrived at the number.
DHS was able to match only around 118,000 names against its immigration database with full details like date of birth and Social Security number. The agency offered no explanation for the additional 160,000, according to a review of the letters. Charles Stewart III, an election administration expert at MIT, noted that the DHS system used for matching, called SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), is known to be error-prone and likely lacked the quality identifiers needed for reliable matches against public voter files.
"DHS likely lacked the identifiers needed for high-quality matching," Stewart wrote. "Anyone with experience in these data-matching exercises should expect those numbers to melt as quickly as ice cream in a Phoenix August."
Stephen Richer, a Republican election official who oversaw Maricopa County, Arizona, from 2021 to 2025, defended the New Jersey system's basic function. Most people registered by error, he explained, ignored the registration entirely and did not vote despite receiving election materials.
"It's not really an example of what they're talking about," Richer said of the GOP claims about widespread fraud.
Election officials in the affected states expressed frustration with DHS's vague communication. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said the state had received no actual list of suspected noncitizens as of Wednesday. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said DHS had provided no evidence to back up its claims when she asked for specifics.
Becker criticized the DHS approach as fundamentally unserious. "Imagine someone said to you: '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.' The first question one would ask is 'which items?'" he said.
History offers a cautionary tale. In 2019, Texas announced it suspected nearly 100,000 noncitizens were on its voter rolls, with 58,000 possibly having voted. The state later admitted the claim was based on flawed data and agreed not to cancel registrations based on it.
The noncitizen registration claims arrived as Trump intensified rhetoric about election security ahead of midterm elections expected to result in GOP losses. Republican lawmakers including Senator Marsha Blackburn cited the 278,000 number as proof that elections cannot be trusted, while Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened prison time for states that don't share voter information with the federal government.
Author James Rodriguez: "The New Jersey data tells us that basic election administration caught a real problem and fixed it, but instead of calling that a win for the system, one side is using incomplete federal numbers to suggest the whole thing is rigged."
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