New Jersey’s Damning Admission on Illegal Voting

National Review Online

Thursday, July 23, 2026

 

For years, critics of anti-voter-fraud measures such as voter identification have denied that any problem exists. The casting and counting of illegal votes is so vanishingly rare, they tell us, that no safeguards are needed.

 

So much for that. New Jersey has now admitted what critics long denied. There are thousands of noncitizens on its voter rolls, and hundreds of them are believed to have voted in the past three years. We can only wonder how many such registrations and voters exist in other states.

 

Governor Mikie Sherrill announced Tuesday that “a serious software error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024,” when fellow Democrat Phil Murphy was governor. A “preliminary analysis,” says Sherrill, “shows fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted.” So far.

 

If Sherrill’s account of the registration SNAFU is believed, these were voters who made no attempt to conceal their noncitizen status when registering, and the problem was one of computer error rather than deliberate fraud. That said, the fact that this went undetected for two to three years shows why periodic reviews of voter rolls are essential. Moreover, if voters had to show proof of citizenship to a human being when registering, it is less likely that they could be registered without some entry in the system clearly classifying them as ineligible to vote.

 

Moreover, the fact that hundreds of these people may have voted shows why safeguards are needed: We can’t just rely on everyone, even people who admit to being noncitizens, to obey prohibitions against voting if they can get away with it.

 

These are real problems, and they require practical solutions. Fortunately, many of the available measures, such as voter ID and allowing states to check for citizenship when registering voters, could address them. Given the comparatively small numbers of votes involved, we have disagreed with those who would require these solutions to be packaged in a one-size-fits-all federal voter ID standard that overrides traditional state powers over elections. But many states have taken unfair and demagogic criticism for adopting commonsense election security laws, and we see now how right they were to ignore the hysterics. More states should follow suit.

 

Critics have now shifted to another tack, arguing that the discovery of a few hundred noncitizen voters in a single state is a far cry from broader claims made by Donald Trump in his never-ending quest to delegitimize the 2020 election. We agree that Trump’s exaggerations and lies have been unhelpful and damaging. But the fact that Trump exaggerates a problem doesn’t mean that we should ignore the scandalous reality that actually exists.

 

It’s extraordinarily rare that a presidential election would turn on just a few hundred votes; the four states that decided the 2020 election, for example, were won by Joe Biden by margins ranging from 10,457 votes in Arizona to 82,166 votes in Pennsylvania. Democratic theories of theft of the 2004 election focused on Ohio, which was decided by 118,601 votes. But rare is not impossible: The 2000 election, of course, was decided by a 537-vote margin in Florida. That prompted the Sunshine State to overhaul its system to become perhaps the best in the country.

 

American democracy is about a lot more than just the presidency. Primary and general elections are held every year for thousands of federal, state, and local offices. Congressional races can and do turn on hundreds of votes, and state legislative races can be even closer — in each case, potentially swinging control of a chamber based upon handfuls of votes. In New Jersey in 2023, one Republican state assembly incumbent lost reelection by 252 votes, and both parties had assembly primaries decided by fewer than 100 votes. Just last week, a New York Assembly primary election was decided by seven votes, after a recount widened the initial margin from two votes. In 2024, control of the Minnesota House hung on 14 missing ballots in one race.

 

Nearly two dozen American elections have been invalidated by courts in the past three decades, 15 of them since 2015. While our election system may never be perfect, power in our democratic system depends upon correctly counting the legal votes. There is no excuse for failing to take reasonable steps to get those outcomes right.