A week after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote to top election officials in four states warning of hundreds of thousands of potential noncitizens on their voter rolls, only New Jersey has admitted to a problem. The other three states have been either noncommittal in responding or have pushed back on Mullin’s claims.
The Department of Homeland Security investigation found California, the nation’s most populous state, had as many as 190,832 noncitizens on its voter rolls based on a review of records matching names with birthdates, federal immigration records, addresses, and Social Security numbers.
The agency, using a similar cross-check of known voter data, found as many as 15,903 noncitizens registered to vote in Nevada, and as many as 14,576 noncitizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania. These battleground states went to Donald Trump in 2024 and to Joe Biden in 2020. In total, the agency said it found about a total of 256,463 potential noncitizens on the four states’ voter rolls.
Notably, the DHS found New Jersey had as many as 35,152 noncitizens registered to vote. Gov. Mikie Sherrill said this week that 6,600 noncitizens were registered at the state’s motor vehicles department, and fewer than 400 had actually voted.
Last Friday, one day after Trump’s primetime address on election integrity, Mullin wrote letters to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, New Jersey Secretary of State Dale Caldwell, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, and Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt regarding noncitizens on voter rolls.
“I hope that you share in the commitment to ensure that only U.S. citizens participate in our federal elections,” the letters from Mullin said. “Allowing just one non-citizen to vote cancels the vote of one U.S. citizen. States are responsible for voter registration, and the federal government is responsible for maintaining immigration records to enable verification of citizenship. Working together, we can more effectively protect U.S. elections.”
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A spokesman for Weber, a Democrat, told the Daily Signal, “The letter is currently in review. We will be in touch if we have anything further to share.”
Aguilar was more defiant, asserting in a statement provided to the Daily Signal, “We refute these claims.”
“These numbers are wildly speculative at best and the Department of Homeland Security hasn’t shared anything that backs it up,” said Aguilar, a Democrat. He added, “There are numerous safeguards in place to prevent noncitizens, or anyone ineligible to vote, from casting a ballot. The administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work.”
None of the four states participated in the DHS Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database to cross-check voter registration data.
Separately, 25 states cross-checked more than 68 million voter registration records through the SAVE database. So far, those states found 28,000 noncitizens registered to vote. Notably, only 10 of those states fully processed the voter data through the SAVE system.
The estimated number of noncitizens on state voter rolls will likely increase as more states using the SAVE system process their final numbers, and as DHS investigates other states not using the system.
Three of the four states that were the focus of Mullin’s letter have Democrat secretaries of state running the elections. Schmidt, a Republican, was appointed by Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro. Schmidt said he would “review any information provided by DHS so that we can evaluate the validity of these claims.”
“In Pennsylvania, every voter must take steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot, including providing proper identification every time they register to vote, vote by mail, or vote at a new polling place,” Schmidt said in a statement provided to the Daily Signal. “All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”
For her part, Sherrill, a Democrat elected last November, blamed the previous administration of Gov. Phil Murphy, also a Democrat, for the registration of 6,600 noncitizen voters. She vowed her administration is reviewing the matter.
“This happened under the previous administration and, upon learning this information, I immediately ordered my chief counsel to launch an investigation to get to the bottom of what occurred,” Sherrill said in remarks earlier this week.
“Initial analysis shows that fewer than 400 newly registered individuals voted in an election due to this software error,” she said. “They were registered as Democrats, Republicans, and the majority unaffiliated, and were scattered across the state.”
However, the company contracting with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission—the France-based IDEMIA—countered that the software worked the way it should, and that state agencies should have caught it.
“All 6,600 individuals indicated ‘Yes’ to wanting to register to vote and ‘No’ to being a US Citizen,” Lisa Shoemaker, IDEMIA’s senior vice president of global corporate relations, said in a statement this week reported by Politico. “This information was recorded correctly and always available to the MVC via the database that MVC utilized to gather voter information and transmit to the Division of Elections. At no point was a noncitizen ever marked as a citizen in the database.”
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