The Many Times Noncitizens Popped Up On Voter Rolls

thefederalist.com

My old man liked to deliver one of his favorite lines when he thought one of his sons wasn’t quite telling him the truth. “Don’t pee down my leg and tell me it’s raining.” I cleaned the expression up a bit. 

The old man would have said the same — the dirtier version —  to today’s Democrats. Particularly when it comes to their big lie that noncitizens rarely show up on voter rolls and they almost never vote in U.S. elections. 

That lie hit the reality wall in New Jersey this week. 

On Tuesday, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill held a press conference to announce that approximately 6,600 noncitizens showed up on the Garden State’s voter rolls. Worse yet, about 400 of them voted in elections in 2023 and 2024. 

Sherrill, a leftist in moderate’s clothing, used the half-hearted mea culpa moment to blame President Trump for peddling “bizarre conspiracy theories about [election] fraud with no evidence.” The governor delivered plenty of evidence on Tuesday. So much so that the Department of Justice now has some very tough questions for the Democrat and New Jersey’s top election official. 

A Federalist analysis shows a much wider spread of noncitizens on state voter lists, instances that defy the story that election integrity-deniers have been telling throughout the Trump era. 

‘We Have To Pass The SAVE America Act’

Confronting a public-relations nightmare a little more than 100 days until the midterm elections, leading Dems have been uncharacteristically quiet. At least on the voter rolls question.

When pressed about his state’s voter roll mess, New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer did some verbal tap dancing on Fox News, and doubled down on why he and his fellow leftists voted against the extremely popular SAVE America Act. The bill would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in U.S. elections and photo ID to cast a ballot in them. And it would require states to clean up their dirty voter rolls so that thousands of foreign nationals don’t have the chance to vote and potentially change the outcome of elections. 

“I’ll say it every day if I have to. The SAVE Act is dead on arrival in the United States Senate,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., smugly wrote beneath a video clip of President Donald Trump scolding the Republican-controlled Senate for failing to pass the SAVE America Act thus far. 

“We have to pass the SAVE America Act to defend American Elections,” Trump said to a standing ovation of Southerners during a rally in Georgia Wednesday evening. 

‘Safe and Secure’

Democrats’ pronouncements on the subject of noncitizens populating voter rolls have not aged well since Gov. Sherrill’s registration confession. 

“Our elections are ALREADY safe and secure. Republicans know that,” Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, never shy about expressing her ignorance, said in April on the Senate floor. “So instead of helping their constituents, they’d rather perpetuate lies about fraud to justify making it harder to vote them out of power.”

Following California’s gobstopper of a primary election in June, Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat who represents the Golden State’s 42nd Congressional District, pooh-poohed allegations of election shenanigans.

“They’re safe, they’re secure, and there’s no fraud that’s happening in California right now,” Garcia told Democratic Party PR firm MS Now. 

Nevada leftist Sen. Jacky Rosen expressed similar sentiments as mail ballots kept trickling in long after California’s primary election day — helping Marxist Los Angeles Council member Nithya Raman overtake rising political star Spencer Pratt in LA’s mayoral “top-two” race. In baseball parlance, you could say Raman won in extra innings. 

Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., in March bashed the SAVE America Act as “a nakedly partisan, totally unworkable, bad-faith bill cynically intended to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.”

Georgia is one of three dozen states that requires voter ID to vote in elections. And more than two-thirds of Georgia voters support requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote, according to a Heritage Action poll. That includes 55 percent of Democrats. 

Ossoff’s claims are patently false, and apparently he doesn’t have room in his bleeding liberal heart to lament the disenfranchisement of hundreds of voters in New Jersey.

‘This is the Important Thing to Understand’

New Jersey, of course, is just the latest state proving the thing that Democrats say never happens, well, happens. 

A review by the Department of Homeland Security found more than 250,000 potential foreign nationals on the voter rolls of just four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The analysis tracked 35,000 potential noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter rolls, more than 190,000 in California where, Rep. Garcia will tell you, elections are safe and secure and there is absolutely no fraud. 

In Pennsylvania, DHS found 14,576 potential noncitizens on the voter registration list. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) for years has been investigating voter rolls in Pennsylvania, which, like its neighbor New Jersey, has had some trouble with its “motor voter” system. According to the state’s own analysis, “approximately 100,000 registered voters may potentially be non-citizens or may have been non-citizens at some point in time.” That was in 2018. 

“This is the important thing to understand: if you told the government that you were a noncitizen, you were still getting registered to vote. It was a computer screwup,” J. Christian Adams, PILF’s president and general counsel, told The Federalist Wednesday in an interview.

PILF has sued Pennsylvania and New Jersey for voting records. 

Pennsylvania officials disputed the number at the time, but acknowledged that a glitch in its voter registration system allowed noncitizens to register to vote. Interestingly, the election official who testified that Pennsylvania’s Department of State had found 100,000 potential noncitizens on the rolls was Al Schmidt — the current Secretary of the Commonwealth, according to WHYY. 

Pennsylvania uses the same software vendor that New Jersey employs to process driver’s license and ID information, according to NBC10 in Philadelphia. Sherrill blamed the vendor for the glitch leading to thousands of noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter rolls. The vendor has pushed back against the governor’s claims. 

‘Proven Wrong Time and Again’

Colorado’s Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted Secretary of State Jena Griswold in 2022 admitted that her office mistakenly sent postcards to approximately 30,000 foreign nationals reminding them to register to vote, the AP reported. Griswold blamed a database “glitch” for the problem. 

A review by Alabama’s Secretary of State found 186 noncitizens registered to vote. Voting history records further indicate that 25 of the 186 noncitizen voters not only registered illegally but also illegally cast ballots in Alabama elections.

In Virginia, elections officials removed more than 1,600 identified noncitizens from the commonwealth’s voter rolls before the 2024 election. 

And this isn’t New Jersey’s first rodeo when it comes to noncitizens voting. 

In May, the Department of Justice charged four resident aliens with illegally voting in federal elections. 

“On their respective voter registration forms, however, they falsely certified and attested that they were United States citizens. In order to register, and to vote, in federal elections, a person must be a United States citizen,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey announced in a press release. 

So much for the claims of Democrats and leftist voting groups that noncitizens on voters rolls rarely happens. 

“For years, Democrats claimed noncitizens weren’t on our voter rolls. They’ve been proven wrong time and again,” Ally Triolo, Republican National Committee Election Integrity communications director, said in a statement to The Federalist. “By blocking the SAVE America Act, Democrats are telling voters exactly where their priorities lie: protecting illegal immigrants—not our elections or Americans’ sacred right to vote.”

Or as the old man would say, Democrats are making a lot of rain. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.