6,600 Noncitizens Registered, Nearly 400 Voted: What Happened in New Jersey?

**Michael Smerconish** (0:00)
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New Jersey mistakenly registered 6,600 non-citizens to vote, and about 400 did so.
Is that an aberration or is that the norm? We have spoken a great deal here recently about the president's speech. It was a week ago tonight, time flies. Mostly, we have spoken about the president's speech from the standpoint of whether the network affiliates and the cable outlets should have carried it live. We have had that conversation, we have had that debate already. But I think that the area, there was disagreement. That was actually a poll question at smerconish.com. When a president says to the nation, I have got something significant to say, should his or her address be carried live as a matter of course, we ended up with like 30,000 people voting and it was a true 50-50 result on that.
There was more agreement when we had the conversation as to whether we believed what the president said as he was essentially making his case for the SAVE Act. I'm a believer in people showing a photo ID when they show up to vote, so long as it's the kind of photo ID that people in that particular community are prone to have. I don't believe that you ought to have to show your birth certificate in order to register to vote. Anyway, some of that's a subject that we've already covered. But I want to drill down on something that the president said. He said that the Department of Homeland Security had identified, quote, approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. His Homeland Security Secretary, Mark Wayne Mullen, had already put a version of that on the record. 250,000 non-citizens registered in just four states. 190,000 in California, I'll underscore this. 35,000 in New Jersey. 15,000 in Nevada. And 14,000 in Pennsylvania. And in our conversations about that statement by the president and from Mark Wayne Mullen, you may remember me referencing initially something that came out in January of 2026 in the New York Times under the headline, Initial Review Finds No Widespread Illegal Voting by Migrants, Puncturing a Trump Claim. It's one of those articles that I held and tucked aside because I knew we'd be coming back to it. And the benefit of the reporting from Alexandra Burson and Nick Corasiniti is they went through states that had done like a cross-tab reference coming to the conclusion that this is the SAVE Act and other attempts at a fix by the Trump administration is a solution in search of a problem. It just doesn't happen. Shit happens, right? I mean, we create this apparatus with volunteers and people who get paid very minimally to conduct our elections. Human factors, I know this from my prior life of being involved in these elections. There's always something that goes awry, but not because of malicious intent.
And I put all of this in the category of stuff happens and thank God it doesn't happen all that often. And then came New Jersey. Governor Mikey Sherrill, I'm looking at the New York Post from yesterday. They're obviously jolly stomping all over this. You can anticipate seeing it on a loop from now until the midterms. Jersey devil. New Jersey admits it registered at least 6,600 non-citizens to vote and 400 did. They had a software glitch. They've explained how it happened. But the question remains, well, do I need to stop saying this doesn't occur with regularity? The person who knows the answer is David Becker. He's the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. David, thank you so much for being here. That Times report that I referred to, correct me if I'm wrong, based in part on your analysis. Is that fair?

**David Becker** (4:38)
I think that's fair. They also got some data from the federal government, and my organization, my non-profit, has been continually looking at data that has been coming out by the federal government, and in particular, coming out from the states who are getting these reports from the federal government claiming large numbers of non-citizens. What we're finding is every single time, once those reports are subjected to scrutiny and the states actually look into them, they are whittled down to a very, very small number of potential non-citizens. And that's because, honestly, the Department of Homeland Security doesn't have very good data on citizenship. And they are open about that. They say that our citizenship data is incomplete. Do not trust it completely.