New Jersey Confirms 400 Noncitizen Votes. DHS Claims of 278,000 More Remain Unverified

Noncitizen voting is not a myth. New Jersey proved that in July.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announced that a software error in the state's motor vehicle registration system improperly added 6,600 noncitizens to the voter rolls. A preliminary state investigation found up to 400 of them actually cast ballots, according to FactCheck.org.

It directly contradicts what some Democrats have said on the record. Sen. Bernie Sanders told the Senate floor in March, "The good news is that noncitizens do not vote in American elections," according to the Daily Signal. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., said last year while opposing the SAVE Act, "Let me be perfectly clear: This is a non-issue. Noncitizens do not vote in U.S. elections."

Those statements were wrong. New Jersey's 400 votes are proof. So is a 2025 Ohio audit that found 167 noncitizens voted between 2018 and 2024, and a 2017 Pennsylvania Department of State analysis that identified 248 self-reported noncitizens who had cast a combined 642 ballots, per testimony to the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee, as reported by the Daily Signal. The Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database has documented over 100 noncitizen voting or registration convictions since 1982, according to FactCheck.org.

The bigger number is unverified

President Trump seized on the New Jersey case to claim, on July 22, that "thousands and thousands" of illegal votes were cast there, and that the problem was far worse in California and Minnesota, according to FactCheck.org. The actual number confirmed by New Jersey's own probe is 400, not thousands. FactCheck.org also notes Kamala Harris beat Trump in New Jersey's 2024 presidential race by more than 252,000 votes, meaning even all 400 noncitizen votes combined couldn't have changed that outcome.

Separately, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that a DHS review found roughly 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote across California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, according to the White House and reported by Breitbart and the Daily Wire. The White House statement argued the real number is "much higher" because Democrat-led states won't share their voter files. DHS has not backed up the claim with public evidence.

CNN reported that officials in all four states said they were blindsided by the announcement and that DHS provided neither its methodology nor the names of the people it claims are ineligible. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar told CNN, "I can't take something that's made up out of thin air and try to justify it or defend it. We operate off of facts, not allegations or anecdotal information."

A related Census Bureau report, which Trump cited on social media as proof "over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally" in 2020, has its own problems. NPR reported the analysis was not produced by career Census Bureau staff, and the team behind it included people affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by former Trump administration officials. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told NPR, "This analysis is laughable. Census data cannot reliably be matched to voter data."

Both sides have a real point

The conservative argument, laid out by J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation to the Daily Signal, is straightforward: "The truth is, are noncitizens voting in the tens of thousands? Absolutely not. But it is happening." Given that the Public Interest Legal Foundation's database shows 1,372 state elections have ended in ties and 530 more decided by a single vote since 1992, even small numbers can matter in down-ballot races.

The Daily Wire also flagged a legitimate process gap. California's Secretary of State's Office told the American Center for Law and Justice, per executive director Jordan Sekulow, that the state's registration system doesn't track a specific reason code for noncitizenship-based cancellations. California's DOJ reportedly has no written policy for handling referrals of suspected illegal voting. That's a real transparency and record-keeping problem, regardless of how many noncitizens are actually voting.

The counterargument, made by NPR and CNN, is equally fair: making a specific, large numerical claim without releasing the underlying methodology isn't accountability, it's an assertion. States can't verify or correct DHS's list if DHS won't share the names or the matching process it used. That doesn't mean the concern is fake. It means the claim is currently unverifiable, which is a different problem than the claim being disproven.

What happens next

The SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote, has stalled in the Senate, according to FactCheck.org. DHS has threatened to withhold grant funding from states that won't share voter rolls for audit, CNN reported. Until DHS releases its methodology and the four flagged states get a chance to check the underlying data against their own rolls, the 278,000 figure remains an allegation, not a finding.