New Jersey Confirms 6,600 Noncitizens on Voter Rolls; 400 Cast Ballots
State-level disclosures in New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are supplying the first concrete numbers in a debate long defined by assertion rather than documented evidence — but the data's...
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy publicly acknowledged that approximately 6,600 noncitizens appear on the state's voter rolls and that roughly 400 of those individuals cast ballots, according to reporting by the Washington Examiner citing the governor's own statements. The disclosure marks one of the few instances in which a sitting state executive has confirmed specific figures tied to noncitizen voter registration rather than offering general characterizations of the issue.
Michigan and Pennsylvania officials have separately identified overlaps between jury-disqualification records — lists of individuals excused from federal jury service on the grounds that they are not U.S. citizens — and active voter registration files, according to the same Washington Examiner report. The specific number of overlapping records in each state has not been publicly released in full by either state's election authority as of July 28, 2026. The complete jury-disqualification datasets, held by U.S. district courts under 28 U.S.C. § 1863, would be the documentary source needed to verify the precise overlap figures.
The disclosures enter an active federal legislative debate. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which passed the U.S. House in April 2024 (Roll Call Vote No. 146, 220–208), would require documentary proof of citizenship at the time of federal voter registration and mandate that states cross-reference voter rolls against federal immigration databases including the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE system. The bill did not advance to a Senate floor vote in the 118th Congress. Its current status in the 119th Congress has not been entered into the congressional record as of this report's publication date.
Opponents of the SAVE Act, including voting rights organizations such as the Brennan Center for Justice, have argued in published analyses that documentary citizenship requirements disproportionately affect eligible voters — particularly naturalized citizens, low-income voters, and minorities — who may not have immediate access to documents such as passports or birth certificates. The Brennan Center's 2023 analysis estimated that approximately 21 million U.S. citizens of voting age lack ready access to documentary proof of citizenship, though that figure draws on survey methodology rather than administrative records.
Several key facts remain unknown from public records. It has not been confirmed whether the approximately 400 New Jersey individuals identified as having voted were prosecuted or referred for federal investigation under 52 U.S.C. § 10307, which prohibits noncitizen voting in federal elections. New Jersey's Division of Elections has not published a formal audit report detailing how the 6,600 registrants were identified, what data source was used for the citizenship determination, or what share of the registrations may reflect data-entry errors versus intentional fraud. A public records request to the New Jersey Division of Elections under the state's Open Public Records Act would be the appropriate mechanism to obtain that documentation.