Roughly 6,600 noncitizens ended up on New Jersey’s voter rolls. Nearly 400 of them cast ballots in elections.
That isn’t a Republican talking point. It’s the admission New Jersey Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherrill shared herself—five days after the Left spent a week insisting that threats to election security are figments of President Donald Trump’s imagination.
In a primetime address, Trump laid out foreign and domestic threats to the integrity of American elections and argued for the photo-identification protections in the federal SAVE America Act. The political Left and much of the press dismissed him before the night was over: Voter fraud is all but nonexistent, they said, and he offered no evidence. Five days later, New Jersey offered it for him.
Every one of those 6,600 registrations entered the system the same way: through New Jersey’s automatic voter registration program.
For anyone unfamiliar with AVR, it registers people to vote when they interact with a state agency, usually the motor vehicle bureau. In some states, registration is the default, requiring people to affirmatively opt out or mail back a card declining.
Roughly half the states have adopted AVR. Ohio, wisely, has not. Here, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles asks whether you’re registered; if you aren’t, you’re offered a form, and an election official later determines whether you’re actually eligible.
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Sherrill blamed the state’s software vendor, IDEMIA, and her predecessor, accusing them of hiding the problem. IDEMIA responded that its software performed as designed and it was not responsible for verifying eligibility—the breakdown came afterward.
Neither the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission nor the Division of Elections disqualified applicants who had answered, in writing, that they were not U.S. citizens. The commission forwarded those names anyway.
Which brings us to Ohio.
When compared to nearly any other state, Ohio gets elections right, but we must never rest on our laurels. After serving as treasurer of the state of Ohio since 2019, I am running for secretary of state. My goal as secretary would be to run the most secure elections in Ohio history, and there remain critical vulnerabilities to our system that the state must confront.
We must enact front-end citizenship verification to ensure that illegal aliens are never entered into our voter registration system. Ohio must pass a strict photo ID requirement for mail-in voting. As secretary, I would seek to eliminate ballot drop boxes, which are open invitations to illegal ballot harvesting and haven’t been needed since COVID-19 lockdowns ended.
Some Democrats want automatic voter registration here. They have fought photo identification, citizenship verification, limits on ballot harvesting, firm deadlines for absentee ballots, and the ban on same-day registration—the entire architecture that keeps Ohio’s rolls accurate.
Leftists will tell you voter fraud is rare in Ohio. They’re right; it is rare. What they never tell you is why.
It’s rare because Ohio decided to make it rare. Photo ID, citizenship checks, ballot-harvesting prohibitions, and disciplined list maintenance are the reasons Ohioans’ confidence in elections is high, turnout is strong, and fraud is negligible. Those safeguards didn’t appear by accident; Republicans built them over years, against opposition from Democrats at every step. You cannot fight a safeguard for a decade and then point to its success as proof it was never necessary.
Democrats spent the week mocking a warning about election security. Then news broke that their own automatic registration system put 6,600 noncitizens on the rolls and let nearly 400 of them vote. In states that treat election security as an inconvenience, this is what the rolls look like.
This November, Buckeyes should remember New Jersey when they vote on State Issue 3—Ohio’s photo identification amendment—and when they choose Ohio’s next secretary of state.
Ohio’s voters need to understand why they can still trust the result here: because someone bothered to build the safeguards that Democrats spend each and every day trying to tear down.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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