By Naeema Saleem — SCN News
WASHINGTON, — More than 30,000 people who identified themselves as non-citizens may have been mistakenly placed on U.S. voter rolls since 2000 because of software glitches, clerical mistakes and failures in state motor-vehicle registration systems, according to a Reuters examination of official records across a dozen states. The cases reveal real weaknesses in voter-registration systems run by both Democratic- and Republican-led states, but Reuters found no evidence that the errors represented an organized effort to register immigrants illegally or that they occurred on a scale capable of determining national election results.
The distinction between being mistakenly registered and actually voting is crucial. Reuters could not determine how many of the more than 30,000 people ultimately cast ballots, and state investigations examined by the news agency generally found voting by ineligible non-citizens to be much rarer than erroneous registrations. With more than 170 million registered voters nationwide, election experts interviewed by Reuters said the documented errors were too small to have affected elections.
The investigation nevertheless exposes a vulnerability that deserves attention because many of the people involved apparently did nothing to conceal their citizenship status. In some cases, immigrants explicitly told government agencies that they were not U.S. citizens, only for software or state employees to send their information into voter-registration systems anyway. That makes the story less about tens of thousands of people secretly attempting to vote and more about what can happen when motor-vehicle databases and election-registration systems communicate incorrectly.
New Jersey provides the clearest recent example. State officials disclosed this summer that approximately 6,600 non-citizens were erroneously registered between June 2023 and June 2024 because of a technology problem involving the Motor Vehicle Commission. The affected applicants had answered “no” when asked whether they were U.S. citizens while applying for driver's licences or identification cards, but the system nevertheless transmitted them for voter registration.
The New Jersey episode became politically significant after President Donald Trump cited it while arguing that non-citizen voting was widespread. But the registration figure and the voting figure were not the same: a preliminary state investigation found that up to about 400 ballots had been cast by people registered through the faulty process, far below the 6,600 erroneous registrations. State officials said there was no evidence at that stage that an election outcome had been changed.
Reuters found comparable bureaucratic failures extending back more than two decades in states including California, Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Virginia. The states span the political spectrum, which is important because the evidence does not point to one party's election administration as the source of the problem.
How are non-citizens getting registered?
The recurring weak point is the interaction between state motor-vehicle agencies and election offices.
Under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as the “Motor Voter” law, states offer voter-registration services when eligible residents apply for or renew driver's licences and receive certain other government services. More recently, many states have introduced automatic voter registration intended to make registration easier for eligible citizens.
The problem arises because receiving a driver's licence does not necessarily establish U.S. citizenship.
All 50 states permit legally present non-citizens to obtain driver's licences, while 19 states and the District of Columbia also provide licences to some undocumented immigrants, Reuters reported. State systems therefore need to distinguish between people eligible for a licence and people eligible to vote.
When that distinction fails — through incorrect coding, employees selecting the wrong document classification, faulty data transfers or software that ignores a citizenship response — an ineligible person's information can be transmitted to election officials.
That is what appears to have happened repeatedly.
In California, Canadian citizen Randall Marquis told Reuters that he received a voter-registration notice after dealing with the state's Department of Motor Vehicles in 2018. Marquis, a green-card holder, knew he was not eligible and alerted news organisations. California officials later disclosed that a processing error may have incorrectly registered as many as 1,500 non-citizens.
Oregon discovered another version of the problem. Its Department of Transportation found clerical, technical and policy errors that resulted in 1,948 people being sent into the voter-registration system without providing proof of eligibility. Oregon officials caution that this does not mean all 1,948 were non-citizens; subsequent checks confirmed that many were citizens who had simply been processed incorrectly.
Some Oregon cases involved immigrants who presented foreign passports or foreign birth certificates. State employees incorrectly coded those documents in ways that triggered voter registration. Others involved people from American Samoa who presented U.S. passports: American Samoans are generally U.S. nationals rather than U.S. citizens and therefore cannot vote in federal elections unless they separately acquire citizenship, but some were nevertheless registered because DMV employees misunderstood their status.
These examples reveal why headline numbers require caution. A person identified during a voter-roll review as having previously presented a non-citizen document is not necessarily still a non-citizen. Legal permanent residents can subsequently naturalize and become eligible voters, and database comparisons conducted years later may therefore produce false positives.
Iowa provides a striking example.
Shortly before the 2024 presidential election, Iowa officials identified more than 2,000 registered voters who had at some point identified themselves to the state transportation department as non-citizens. That initially produced concern that thousands of ineligible voters were registered. After additional investigation, however, the number was reduced to 277.
Iowa officials ultimately said 35 non-citizens cast ballots that were counted in the 2024 general election, in which more than 1.6 million Iowans voted. Those cases demonstrate that illegal non-citizen voting does occur, but they also show why preliminary database matches should not automatically be treated as confirmed illegal voters.
Virginia has reported larger registration numbers over a longer period. State election reports have identified hundreds of non-citizens on voter rolls in individual years, with more than 4,500 reported in 2025. But Virginia officials say those totals include people who later became citizens as well as registrations subsequently removed, meaning the figures cannot simply be interpreted as thousands of non-citizens casting illegal ballots.
Did 30,000 non-citizens illegally vote?
No evidence establishes that.
Reuters' figure concerns people who were registered, or apparently registered, despite records indicating that they were non-citizens at some point. Reuters explicitly said it could not determine how many of those individuals actually voted.
Registration and voting are separate events. Someone can be erroneously entered onto a voter roll, receive a registration card and never attempt to vote. State investigations can subsequently identify the mistake and remove the registration.
There are documented instances in which non-citizens have voted illegally. Federal law prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections, and such violations can carry serious criminal and immigration consequences. But available federal prosecutions do not show voting by non-citizens occurring on the massive scale sometimes alleged in political debate.
A separate Reuters analysis found that federal prosecutors had charged 129 people under the federal “voting by aliens” statute enacted in 1996. None of those prosecutions alleged a coordinated effort to influence an election.
That distinction is particularly important because Trump and some Republican allies argue that widespread non-citizen voting threatens American elections. The White House told Reuters that the registration cases demonstrate election systems have been compromised and pointed to 11 arrests announced by federal authorities since May involving alleged illegal voting by non-citizens.
Trump has also alleged that Democrats facilitate non-citizen voting to gain electoral advantage. Reuters reported that evidence reviewed for its investigation did not establish an organized Democratic effort to register non-citizens, and the documented administrative failures occurred in states governed by both parties.
The administration and its supporters nevertheless argue that even relatively small numbers represent an unacceptable weakness because citizenship is a basic qualification for federal voting. Don Palmer, a former Trump-appointed chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission who is now with the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Reuters that DMV errors were probably a primary route through which non-citizens entered voter rolls and said states have an obligation to correct the problem.
Would requiring proof of citizenship solve it?
That question is now at the centre of the political fight.
The White House is pressing Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would impose documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration and photo-identification requirements for voting. Supporters argue the requirements would provide a straightforward safeguard ensuring that only U.S. citizens participate in federal elections.
Critics argue that documentary requirements could make registration harder for eligible Americans who do not readily possess passports, birth certificates or other qualifying records. They also question whether the legislation would actually prevent the specific mistakes identified by Reuters.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Reuters that in many of the cases the individual had supplied the government with correct information and the administrative process itself failed. If an applicant presented information showing that he or she was not a citizen but a state employee or software system coded it incorrectly, requiring another document would not necessarily prevent the same human or technical error.
That does not mean stronger verification systems could not reduce errors. States can improve database checks, document classification, employee training and communication between motor-vehicle and election agencies. The disagreement is over which safeguards are effective and whether additional requirements would impose substantial burdens on eligible citizens relative to the scale of the problem.
Why the 30,000 figure needs context
Reuters assembled the figure using data from the Center for Election Innovation & Research and then checked cases against state officials, court records and local reporting. The news organisation cautioned that the total remains inexact because state figures are often preliminary and are revised after individual records are investigated.
The figure also spans more than a quarter-century, from 2000 through 2026, rather than representing registrations from a single election.
And it is being compared with a U.S. electorate containing more than 170 million registered voters. Experts interviewed by Reuters said the confirmed scale was therefore too small to have affected national election outcomes.
At the same time, dismissing every case as irrelevant would miss the administrative problem exposed by the investigation. People who explicitly identify themselves as non-citizens should not emerge from a government transaction registered to vote. The New Jersey and Oregon cases demonstrate that poorly designed software and incorrect processing can defeat safeguards even when applicants provide accurate information.
That produces a more complicated picture than either side of the political argument sometimes presents. Non-citizens have mistakenly appeared on voter rolls and a smaller number have illegally cast ballots. But the evidence reviewed by Reuters does not establish widespread, coordinated non-citizen voting or a scheme capable of changing national election results.
Instead, the investigation points primarily toward a less dramatic but concrete vulnerability: fragmented government databases, motor-vehicle agencies processing multiple immigration statuses, employees misclassifying documents and software systems sometimes transmitting people into voter-registration databases even after those individuals identified themselves as ineligible.
With the Nov. 3 midterm elections approaching, those distinctions will matter increasingly. Republicans are pushing tighter citizenship-verification requirements, while opponents warn against using isolated administrative failures to justify restrictions affecting millions of eligible voters. The documented cases give policymakers evidence that registration systems need improvement, but they do not by themselves resolve the larger argument over how extensive new federal voting requirements should be.
For election administrators, the practical lesson is narrower and less partisan: citizenship information already supplied by an applicant must reliably follow that person through the registration system. New Jersey's 6,600 erroneous registrations show what can happen when software fails that test; Oregon's experience shows how document coding can produce the same outcome through human error. Fixing those pathways is separate from the political debate over whether non-citizen voting is widespread.