New Jersey's noncitizen voter disclosure shows the system works | Opinion

There are two very different views on election integrity and voter fraud currently espoused by American politicians.

The loudest view, shouted at every opportunity by President Donald Trump but not supported by evidence, is that voter fraud is rampant in our country, especially among noncitizens allegedly casting ballots.

The more nuanced view, with a foundation in actual evidence, is that voter fraud and noncitizen voting are rare occurrences that our election infrastructure is designed to catch and eliminate, and to prosecute as necessary.

The news out of New Jersey proves that second point of view, even as those who spout Trump's claims try to hijack it as evidence of their unsubstantiated claims.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat elected last fall, on July 21 announced that as many as 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote in her state in 2023 and 2024 because of a computer software error, though fewer than 400 actually cast ballots.

Sherrill and her staff did not try to cover up or defend this glitch. They caught it. They publicly announced it. And they are replacing the vendor that caused the problem.

And the governor saw where this was going, too.

Trump won't stop fighting imaginary voter fraud

Trump has been banging away at Republicans in Congress to pass his so-called SAVE America Act, which he casts as crucial for election integrity, but which is really just an unconstitutional power grab that would allow Trump to pick the voters, rather than having the voters pick who represents them in Congress in November's midterm elections.

Sherrill, in a July 21 social media post, said Trump is trying to "weaponize elections for political gain" and "has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity," citing his efforts for more than a decade to "undermine Americans' faith in our elections."

Trump did that, she noted, by lying about results when he didn't like them, trying to overturn the 2020 election results, and then defunding federal election security efforts during his second term.

Here's the truth about noncitizens voting in America: It's been illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections since the 1920s, and Congress made it a federal crime 30 years ago.

There are 12 states where legal residents who are not American citizens can vote in some local elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Any American who interacts with the government in any way knows mistakes happen. That applies to elections and how they're run. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress would have you believe that those mistakes are intentional. But these kinds of problems crop up in red states, too.

I learned about this back in 2017, a year after Trump won my home state, Pennsylvania, while securing his first term as president. Al Schmidt, the top Republican election official in Philadelphia at the time, discovered that Pennsylvania Department of Transportation computer kiosks used by legal nonresidents to seek driver's licenses had a glitch that also let them register to vote.

Many of those nonresidents, more than 1,000 since 1972, had discovered the problem on their own and sought to cancel their voter registrations, the state found. So the very people Trump claims are sneaking into our elections are the ones helping to point out problems in voter registration.

The problem got fixed. And Schmidt is now Pennsylvania's secretary of state, overseeing elections under a Democrat as governor, Josh Shapiro.

This is the sort of context Trump loathes as he seeks to seize control of our elections. But that context is out there.

Red states show how rare noncitizen voting is

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group "dedicated to election integrity," in a 2020 report found that at least 19 noncitizens were registered to vote in Palm Beach County, Florida, even after they identified themselves as noncitizens. Guess who else is registered to vote in that county: the president himself.

Look to red states to show us how rare noncitizen voting is.

In Georgia, a 2024 audit by the Republican secretary of state found 20 noncitizens who had registered to vote, with nine casting ballots, out of 8.2 million registered voters.

In Utah, "a comprehensive citizenship review" from April 2025 to May 2026 found 27 noncitizens registered to vote out of more than 2 million registered voters.

In Kansas, a federal appeals court in 2020 rejected a law pushed by state Attorney General Kris Kobach that required proof of citizenship to register to vote. The judges in that ruling found that at most, 67 noncitizens tried to register to vote in Kansas in the 19 prior years and only 39 succeeded, which they called "incredibly slight evidence" of a problem.

If Kobach's name sounds familiar, that's because he was cochair of the "Commission on Election Integrity" that Trump launched in the first year of his first term, only to disband eight months later because it was such a mess.

That's how this always plays out. Trump and his allies thrash about with unsubstantiated claims or outright lies about election integrity. But if you seek context, you find out just how empty those claims really are.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on Bluesky, @bychrisbrennan.bsky.social, and on X, @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New Jersey's noncitizen voter disclosure shows the system works | Opinion

Reporting by Chris Brennan, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

This story was originally published July 23, 2026 at 2:11 AM.