Hundreds turn up where they should not be
Documents reviewed by The Federalist show hundreds of noncitizens living in New Jersey were registered to vote, sometimes without realizing it. At least eight of the state’s 21 counties showed cases of noncitizens asking to be removed from the rolls after discovering they had been listed as voters. Fox News reported that most of those records identified the people as Democrats, which is the sort of party label nobody wants attached to a registration mistake, but the bigger issue is simpler: people who were not eligible ended up in the system anyway. New Jersey Republican Party Chairwoman Christine Giordano said the state GOP filed public records requests with all 21 county commissioners of registration and still has not received every document. In other words, the paper trail is doing what paper trails often do, which is arrive late and with an attitude.
Some blamed DMV confusion and language barriers
One Atlantic County case involved a noncitizen who said the registration was accidental and tied to language barriers. Another requested removal from the voter rolls because he did not understand how he became registered through the Department of Motor Vehicles, according to a letter from Atlantic County Superintendent of Elections and Commissioner of Registration Maureen G. Bugdon. Giordano said some noncitizens told the party they were pushed into registering through New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission system even after they told workers they were not citizens and did not want to register. That claim fits a familiar pattern in modern government: a system gets built for convenience, then everyone acts surprised when the convenience creates a problem. The state’s own records also showed one noncitizen who asked to be removed had voted three times in 2000, three times in 2001, and once in 2008. If that sounds like a glitch, it is a very old glitch.
New Jersey’s system leans on a box and a promise
Giordano said the state has no reliable way to know how many noncitizens may be registered, because the only people officials can count are the ones who come forward. That is not exactly a strong defense for a free election system. Right now, the federal voter registration form mostly relies on a tiny box where applicants say, under penalty of perjury, that they are citizens. No document is required to prove it. The setup is the political version of “honor system,” which works fine for school lunch money and not so well for deciding who gets a ballot. A 2017 report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation said New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission could enroll noncitizens without further verification if they checked the citizenship box, even if they showed a Green Card at the time. Bureaucracy, as ever, found a way to make the obvious complicated.
The SAVE Act is meant to close that gap
Republicans say the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and voter ID to cast a ballot by amending the National Voter Registration Act. That law is the same one that tied driver’s license applications to federal voter registration, so the fix is aimed at the same pipeline that created the problem. But on June 4, during a late-night vote-a-rama, Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and Thom Tillis voted against a motion to waive budgetary procedural objections to an amendment on the bill offered by Sen. Lindsey Graham, according to The Hill. The New Jersey records show why the fight matters. In hundreds of cases, noncitizens wound up on the rolls, and election officials often learned about it only after the people themselves spoke up. That is not a system with strong guardrails. It is a system waiting for a form to be filled out correctly and hoping for the best, which has become a very expensive habit in government.
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