Republican officials in New Jersey say they have found hundreds of noncitizens registered to vote after requesting voter rolls from every county in the state, and some of those noncitizens cast ballots in past elections.

The New Jersey Republican Party and the Republican National Committee obtained the records by submitting requests to all 21 New Jersey counties. What came back, according to RNC Chairman Joe Gruters, was a pattern that appeared in county after county: names of people who are not U.S. citizens sitting on active voter rolls, with some who had participated in elections stretching back more than two decades.

Fox News Digital reviewed more than 50 documents from Atlantic County alone, letters from noncitizens who said they had been registered to vote without their knowledge. Many of those individuals discovered the registration only when they began the naturalization process and asked to be removed from the rolls. At least one noncitizen who was eventually removed in 2015 had voted in 2000, 2001, and the 2008 general election.

RNC chairman: 'This is just the people that have self-reported'

Gruters framed the findings as a direct rebuttal to Democratic leaders who have long dismissed noncitizen voting as a negligible or nonexistent problem. As Breitbart News reported, Gruters called the scope of the discoveries striking, and warned that what has surfaced so far likely represents only a fraction of the real number.

"I mean, it's really incredible because here the Democrats are saying that, you know, noncitizens never vote, this is a non-issue, but every county we're finding people that are self-reporting now, and I'm glad we're doing these records request because it's really eye-opening, because this is just the people that have self-reported."

That last point matters. The noncitizens identified so far are those who came forward voluntarily, typically during the citizenship application process, when they realized they were already listed as registered voters. No one knows how many others remain on the rolls without having flagged themselves.

New Jersey GOP Chairwoman Christine Giordano Hanlon said the party's analysis is still in its early stages. Fox News reported her stating that the effort has "already uncovered hundreds of instances of non-citizens placed on New Jersey's voter rolls over the past few years." In May, Hanlon announced the launch of the state party's Election Integrity Task Force.

"Like many New Jerseyans, election integrity is of utmost importance to me. All Americans want free, fair, and secure elections and a system that maintains the public trust. The NJGOP Election Integrity Task Force will work to help ensure that New Jersey's elections are securely and fairly administered and help safeguard the integrity of the process."

The question of how noncitizens ended up registered in the first place remains unanswered. No state or county election officials have been quoted addressing the findings or explaining the process that produced the registrations.

A history of dirty rolls in the Garden State

This is not the first time New Jersey's voter rolls have raised red flags. In 2022, the Public Interest Legal Foundation conducted a review that found almost 2,400 registrants listed on the state's rolls who were 105 years old or older. That kind of data hygiene problem, ancient registrations that no one bothers to clean, creates exactly the environment where errors, or worse, can go undetected for years.

The pattern is familiar to anyone following noncitizen voting cases in other states. The registrations accumulate quietly. The safeguards that should catch them are either absent or unenforced. And when someone finally looks, the scope of the problem turns out to be larger than officials had acknowledged.

Gruters said the RNC has requested information about voter registration list maintenance processes from 48 states. New Jersey and other Democrat-run states, he said, have been unwilling to disclose how they maintain their lists. That reluctance itself raises a question: if the rolls are clean, why resist showing the work?

The SAVE Act and congressional inaction

The New Jersey findings feed directly into a broader fight over the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. President Donald Trump has been urging lawmakers to pass the legislation. Polling cited in the reporting shows the measure commands support from 91 percent of Republicans, 50 percent of Democrats, and 69 percent of independents.

Yet Congress has failed to act. Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, recently called the impasse an embarrassment, and drew a pointed comparison to a country not typically held up as a model of governance.

"It's kind of embarrassing from the perspective of Congress, that we can't even pass a SAVE America Act. Let me lay out how Colombian elections are run. First of all, no mail-in balloting. Single day election, you have to have your proof of national citizenship with you to vote. So, it's not only voter ID, but 100 percent strict proof of citizenship. If you don't have it with you, they don't even let you into the hall where you vote."

Moreno went further, describing a system of all-paper ballots counted by hand, with results delivered within ninety minutes of polls closing, monitored by election watchers and judges who adjudicate disputes on the spot. The contrast with American election administration, where some states take weeks to finish counting and basic citizenship verification remains optional, is hard to miss.

The SAVE Act's broad bipartisan support among voters makes congressional resistance all the more difficult to defend. A measure backed by majorities of both parties' voters should not be a heavy lift. But in Washington, the incentives of elected officials do not always align with the preferences of the people they represent.

What the findings do, and don't, prove

Republicans have not yet released a full accounting of how many noncitizens appeared on the rolls in each county, how many had voting histories, or how many registrations have been canceled beyond the single removal documented in 2015. The analysis is ongoing. Key questions remain about the mechanism that placed noncitizens on the rolls and whether any state agency bears direct responsibility.

But the facts already on the table are damaging enough. Hundreds of noncitizens were registered. Some voted. The registrations spanned multiple counties. And the state did not catch the problem, the Republican Party did, by doing the basic work of requesting public records.

That last detail deserves emphasis. The government entities charged with maintaining election integrity did not surface these cases. A political party armed with public-records requests did. When investigators in other states have uncovered fraud that officials preferred to ignore, the response from those in power has too often been to minimize or obstruct rather than fix.

Gruters put the stakes plainly, in terms that should not be controversial regardless of party affiliation.

"You want a democracy that's secure and elections that are free and safe and that people can depend upon, and people have full confidence in."

Democrats who dismiss these findings as a "non-issue", Gruters's characterization of their standard line, face an increasingly awkward burden. Every new batch of records, every new county that turns up noncitizen registrants, makes the denial harder to sustain. The argument that noncitizen voting never happens requires ignoring the noncitizens who voted.

And the broader pattern of Democratic officials resisting accountability measures rather than welcoming transparency does nothing to build the public confidence both parties claim to want.

The real cost of dirty voter rolls

Election integrity is not an abstraction. Every ballot cast by a noncitizen cancels out the vote of a lawful citizen. Every registration that should not exist is a crack in the system that lawful voters are told to trust without question.

New Jersey's rolls contained hundreds of those cracks. The state did not find them. It took an outside effort, and the simple act of asking for public records, to bring them into the open. The question now is whether anyone in Trenton will treat the findings as a reason to act, or whether the default response will be the same one voters have heard for years: nothing to see here.

When Colombia runs cleaner elections than the United States, the problem is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of will, and in some quarters, a lack of interest in finding out what the rolls actually contain.