Politico Finally Admits Voter Registration Runs On Honor System

Politico has spent months telling Americans that Republican concerns about noncitizens in our elections were exaggerated. Yet now that New Jersey admitted more than 6,000 noncitizens ended up on its voter rolls (about 400 of whom voted) — Politico has discovered the problem was apparently an “open secret” all along.

New Jersey Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherrill recently announced that a “software error” in the state’s motor vehicle system “led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024.” The noncitizens allegedly answered “no” when asked whether they were citizens, but the system registered them anyway. Of those registered, nearly 400 illegally cast a ballot, the governor’s office said.

Now that the reality of noncitizens both registering to vote and voting is too difficult for the corporate media to ignore, they have to cover it. Politico’s Matt Friedman reports that the announcement “exposed an open secret about New Jersey’s so-called motor voter law that officials and political operatives have known for years: There’s little to stop noncitizens from registering to vote if they want to, or even by mistake.”

In fact, “election officials and campaign consultants from both parties believe that the number of noncitizens being added to the voter rolls is significantly higher than the 6,600 Sherrill cited — because the state has been automatically registering drivers since 2018, and her figure covers only June 2023 to June 2024,” Friedman writes.

One election official told Friedman that “it’s the honor system.”

That’s true. New Jersey’s system (like the rest of the federal voter registration system) can use a Social Security number or driver’s license identification number to confirm a prospective voter’s identity, but neither guarantees citizenship since noncitizens can get both of those documents. The system — as with all federal voter registration systems — merely asks applicants to tell the truth about their citizenship status. If the system registering does not require proof of citizenship in order to register a new voter, then it depends on the prospective voter being honest (and software processing those answers correctly).

But this vulnerability is neither new nor a secret. In fact, it’s the exact reason Republicans introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would amend the NVRA to require documentary proof of citizenship. The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) requires registration to be available at state motor vehicle departments. But to register to vote, one only needs to attest under penalty of perjury that they are telling the truth about their citizenship status.

But Democrats refuse to support the SAVE America Act, despite Friedman trying to cover for Democrats in the subhead, writing that “Democrats and Republicans agree the registration system is a mess.” (If that were true, Democrats would join Republicans in passing the SAVE America Act. Instead, they’ve refused).

But for Friedman to frame his story as exposing an “open secret” is an insult.

Politico has known about the problem — and Republican efforts to fix the problem — for ages; it just purposely portrayed the efforts themselves as problematic and “overblown.”

In February Politico’s Dana Nickel complained that Washington was “so focused” on the “rare” problem of noncitizen voting. Rather than inquire how “safe” our elections are or how susceptible they may be to foreign election interference, Nickel framed the SAVE America Act as a response to an imaginary threat.

“While Hill Republicans and members of the Trump administration have framed these bills as much-needed reform for pressing election security issues, data collected by state election offices suggests that the threat being targeted is largely overblown,” Nickel wrote. But that’s not true, as Friedman’s piece points out, because not only were thousands of noncitizens registered in New Jersey, locals say the number of noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter roll is likely far greater than the state has admitted because the system is so vulnerable. Friedman even now concedes that there is “little to stop noncitizens from registering to vote if they want to, or even by mistake.”

Nonetheless, Nickel insisted that “noncitizen voting in the U.S. is extremely rare” and that “state election offices conduct regular assessments of their voter rolls to curb risks of voter fraud.”

Of course Politico’s own recent reporting directly undercuts its reporting from just five months ago. To be clear, absolutely nothing has changed. The system hasn’t changed. The laws haven’t changed. The only thing that changed is that the problem became too big to ignore.

Politico didn’t “expose” an open secret; the outlet merely started reporting the very same facts that Republicans had been citing all along — after it spent months smearing GOP-proposed safeguards as unnecessary and restrictive.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2