Revelations that thousands of noncitizens were found on New Jersey’s voter rolls—and that hundreds cast ballots illegally—have raised questions about the extent of the problem, how long it has persisted, and how it can be remedied.
President Donald Trump’s recent national address on election integrity thrust the noncitizen voting issue into the national spotlight.
He said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) found 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote.
Investigators from the Trump administration tallied 250,000 of those unqualified registrants in four blue, or Democrat-led, states: California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
Across 23 other states—predominantly Republican-governed—investigators found 28,000 noncitizens on voter rolls, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters. The agency also identified 400,000 deceased people still registered to vote, he said.
Those figures are based on a “preliminary review” of data, DHS said.
Logan Churchwell, who heads noncitizen voting investigations for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told The Epoch Times that “motor voter” systems—especially those with automatic registration features—can easily “trap noncitizens into the voting process.”
The foundation reported finding “enforcement flaws” in New Jersey’s automatic voter registration system in 2017.
Churchwell’s organization also found similar issues in Oregon and South Dakota, he said, noting that “this has happened in California and Nevada, too.”
The problem is more likely in states that automatically register people to vote when they interact with certain agencies—typically motor vehicle bureaus, he said.
What Happened in New Jersey?
Last week—days after Trump’s national address—New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that about 6,600 noncitizens were mistakenly registered to vote in the Garden State “through no fault of their own.”DHS reported that the number of noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter rolls could total 35,152—about five times more than Sherrill acknowledged, Mullin wrote on X.
Sherrill blamed the problem on a “serious software error” that caused a computer system to improperly register people to vote even after those individuals correctly identified themselves as noncitizens.
However, the technology company that has worked with the Garden State’s motor vehicle agency for decades, IDEMIA, disputed that characterization.
The noncitizens were added to voter rolls after they also had indicated “yes” when asked if they wanted to register, the company told The Epoch Times in an email the day after Sherrill’s statement.
“The voter registration information is transmitted to the New Jersey Department of State, Division of Elections, which is ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote,” the company said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times.
“Information submitted by IDEMIA must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections.”
Examples in at Least 7 States
Current users of the automatic registration approach that have had past or recent issues with noncitizen registrations include New Jersey, Oregon, Alaska, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.In 2024, more than 1,600 noncitizens were mistakenly registered to vote in Oregon; a technical and clerical error was to blame, officials said at the time.
During two years ending in 2024, about 50 people in Alaska were registered to vote even though they stated that they were not U.S. citizens, according to information that surfaced in a 2025 lawsuit.
In 2020, the Illinois automatic voter registration system mistakenly registered more than 547 noncitizens to vote. Those people correctly answered no to a citizenship attestation, but a “programming error” caused their data to be entered in the registration process, officials said.
In 2018, California officials announced that 1,500 individuals might have been registered to vote in error during a six-month period. The issue was blamed on a “processing error” that registered legal resident noncitizens to vote.
And in 2017, a Pennsylvania report showed that about 200 noncitizens were able to legally register to vote because of a glitch in the state’s electronic driver’s licensing system.
The Epoch Times contacted all of the listed states for comment; only Illinois responded by publication time.
—Janice Hisle; Savannah Hulsey Pointer; Timothy Frudd; Stacy Robinson
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