MARIO KRANJAC: Non-citizens are voting in my state—they could be voting in yours too

After decades of being told that states have adequate safeguards to ensure non-citizens are not voting in American elections, recent developments and disclosures have proven those assurances false.

In my own State of New Jersey, it was revealed that at least 6,600 non-citizens were registered via Motor Voter, although the federal government suspects the number of non-citizen registered voters might be a great deal higher.

More troubling is that the Democrats in charge of administering elections in the State have blamed others rather than being transparent about how errors happened and what they will do to fix them. After all, it took NJ Democrats over two years to publicly disclose the unlawful registrations and voting. With their craven pursuit of money, control, and power, NJ Democrats have completely lost all credibility.

But the strategy of shifting blame and refusing transparency is not just confined to New Jersey. It is leading more and more citizens in other states to believe that non-citizens may be registered to vote in their elections, too.

Motor Voter, also known as the National Voter Registration Act, is a 1994 law intended to make voter registration more accessible by integrating voter registration opportunities into the driver’s license application and renewal process nationwide.

According to testimony by John Samples, vice president at the Cato Institute, the promises of Motor Voter were that the law would enhance the accuracy of voter registration rolls maintained by individual states and provide additional security to ensure that only eligible voters could participate in federal elections.

There is no legitimate reason why various states are refusing to participate in the federal effort to audit the accuracy of voter registration records amidst a deluge of news that non-citizens have registered in significant numbers.

The Department of Justice has sued 30 states, mostly controlled by Democrats, “for failing to produce their full voter registration lists upon request.”

One thing is clear: concerns about New Jersey registering non-citizens to vote in elections are not confined to just New Jersey.

In Pennsylvania, election authorities raised fears that up to 100,000 non-citizen voters were improperly registered to vote under the state’s Motor Voter system called SURE.

In 2017, the state called it “a glitch” and then hired outside attorneys who promised they fixed the problem, notes a lawsuit by Public Interest Legal Foundation, which tried to force the state to be more transparent about what their lawyers found.

For nearly ten years, Pennsylvania has refused to cooperate with a public investigation by the state’s own Auditor General about how the “glitch” happened and what was done to correct it.

According to a report by the Department of the Auditor General (DAG), Pennsylvania’s Department of State refused to cooperate with the state’s audit without providing a plausible explanation for their noncooperation.

“Accordingly, DAG was unable to establish with any degree of reasonable assurance that the SURE system is secure and that Pennsylvania voter registration records are complete, accurate, and in compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and related guidelines,” concluded DAG.

In fact, in 2026, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) identified Pennsylvania, New Jersey and two other states as having potentially significant numbers of non-citizen voters.

California, with 190,832 potential non-citizen voters, is followed by Nevada with 15,903, when figuring by percentage of total voters.

New Jersey comes in second at 35,152– much higher than the 6,600 number the state has admitted to– when figuring by total number of potential non-citizen voters.

DHS tallied the Pennsylvania non-citizen voter problem at 14,576 currently. And these are just the states that, so far, have had some scrutiny regarding non-citizen voting.

What about the 26 other states that have refused the federal government’s request to audit voter information?

The truth is nobody really knows how deeply the voter rolls have been affected by large-scale immigration and the automation of voter registration since the passage of the National Voter Registration Act in 1994.

The record demonstrates Democrat refusal to investigate these concerns seriously. What we do know is that the law specifically requires the states to maintain accurate voter registration records to ensure only eligible voters participate under 52 U.S. Code § 20507.

Recently, there have been too many reported examples of why the public might question whether the states are fulfilling their responsibilities under that law to make sure only citizens vote.

But Motor Voter also gives the federal government the authority to compel the states to maintain accurate voting records.

The federal government’s ability to compel states to prove they maintain accurate voting records is the only way citizens will know if non-citizen voting is happening in their states, too.

Mario Kranjac is an attorney, venture capitalist, and former Mayor of Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Nicknamed the "Trumpy Mayor" he unseated a deep blue political dynasty and is working to save the state from one-party rule.