LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Now to New Jersey, where the governor says a software glitch a few years ago added more than 6,000 noncitizens to the voter rolls. Four hundred of them actually cast votes. Governor Mikie Sherrill says those thousands of people disclosed they were not U.S. citizens when registering for a driver's license or legal ID, but between 2023 and 2024 they were signed up anyway.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MIKIE SHERRILL: They were registered as Democrats, Republicans, and the majority unaffiliated and were scattered across the state. But let me be clear. This entire situation is unacceptable.
FADEL: So let's put this in context here with David Becker. He leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research. That's a nonprofit that works with Republicans and Democrats on building trust in elections. David, good morning.
DAVID BECKER: Good morning, Leila.
FADEL: So the New Jersey governor says these noncitizens are being removed from the voter roles. How significant is it that 400 people cast votes that they shouldn't have?
BECKER: Well, Governor Sherrill's right - this shouldn't have happened. This appears to have been the result of a vendor that worked for the motor vehicles agency in New Jersey having a glitch in their system where, though the individuals all were entirely truthful, the information about their citizenship nevertheless created a workflow in the voter registration system that shouldn't have been there. That was a technical glitch.
But still, 6,600 out of the entire New Jersey population is still only 0.1% of the entire voter registration list, and the 400 individuals who voted was 0.009% of the number of people who voted, for instance, in 2024 in New Jersey. So this isn't affecting elections. But Governor Sherrill's quite right - this shouldn't have happened. And to her credit and to the credit of the state, they discovered this, they were transparent about it and they were very clear about fixing this immediately.
FADEL: Now, before this happened, we had a Republican strategist on our program this week imply that noncitizens are voting in a rampant fashion across the country. Is that actually true? How frequently are noncitizens voting?
BECKER: Well, we have a really good handle on this. And my nonprofit collects research on this from the states, and what we often see is there are highly politicized statements like that claiming there are large numbers of noncitizens. We even heard that last week from the president. But there's no documentary or evidence that suggests that's actually true. And when states actually investigate this, what they find is a very small number.
It's true that there are some situations where noncitizens get onto the voter list, usually accidentally - almost always accidentally. Because if you're here as a noncitizen, you wouldn't want to paint a bull's-eye on yourself just for the possibility that you might cast a single ballot in an election. That will get you deported and possibly prosecuted. So this happens extremely rarely. The numbers are very, very small. Even the president's Department of Homeland Security has looked at 68 million records and was able to confirm that 99.96% of all of those records were - represented documented citizens that they had in their system. And even the remaining 0.04%, many of those were citizens, it's just that DHS didn't have the documentation within their system to confirm.
FADEL: The White House says these discrepancies underline the need for a bill Trump is pushing to get passed which would increase the requirements Americans face in order to register and to vote. If that bill were law, would it have prevented these improper votes in New Jersey?
BECKER: So first of all, I don't know that anyone knows what's in that bill right now. The last published version I saw was months ago. And the versions that are being considered on the Hill haven't been released and I don't know if the president knows either. But if there were some kind of national requirement to document citizenship before registering, it would still require a system that collected and stored that data in a proper way, so that wouldn't have affected this at all.
The system failed here - the technical system. The vendor should have created a better system here. And the states are doing a good job of making sure their systems work better now. So there's no way that the SAVE Act would have changed this in any way.
FADEL: David Becker is executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. Thank you for your time.
BECKER: Thank you, Leila.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
