Alaska recently removed 3,048 residents from the state's active voter list because they might be non-citizens.
On July 22, 2026, Carol Beecher, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, told state lawmakers that the removals were the result of "old data" received from the department of motor vehicles. She also said she's not sure why so many residents were flagged as possible non-citizens.
When Alaska residents apply for a driver's license they have the opportunity to register to vote. The registration process requires the applicant to state whether or not they are a citizen. Several times each year, Alaska elections officials check the state's voter roll against department of motor vehicles records to see if there are any people incorrectly registered to vote. That check usually results in about 200 names being flagged for investigation.
Per normal procedure, the Alaska Division of Elections sent thousands of letters to people who were flagged by the department of motor vehicles, asking those people if they are citizens. In order to maintain their status as a registered voter, recipients of the letters need only to contact the Alaska Division of Elections by phone, e-mail, or mail and state that they are a citizen (no paperwork or documentation is required).
Source:
Brooks, James; Smith, Corinne. (July 23, 2026)"Alaska removes thousands from state's active voter list, erroneously flagging some citizens". Alaska Beacon. Retrieved 2026-07-25.
At a July 21, 2026 press conference, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill (a Democrat) announced that between June 2023 and June 2024 6,600 people were registered to vote, even though they had stated they were not U.S. citizens. The error was due to a software problem at New Jersey's department of motor vehicles. The software problem allowed nearly 400 non-citizens to vote in elections starting in 2023, but the problem was discovered and fixed in June of 2024.
The software issue involved the French multinational technology company IDEMIA, which New Jersey has wroked with for decades. New Jersey will soon be replacing IDEMIA with another vendor.
State officials did not alert the public, or the 6,600 people who had improperly been registered, until this week.
Sherrill said that the state is still investigating, and that based on what officials know so far, the nearly 400 votes did not change the outcome of any races. She said an independent investigation will be conducted to determine exactly what happened, and she promised to publicly release the results.
Source:
Nissenbaum, Dion. (July 23, 2026)"Noncitizen voters discovered in New Jersey fuel nationwide debate over how frequently that happens". Votebeat. Retrieved 2026-07-25.
Later in the day, DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon (Civil Rights Divison) sent a letter to Sherrill asking that she provide the DOJ with the full names, dates of birth, nationalities, residential addresses, registration dates, and registration locations for the 6,600 people improperly registered, and for the approximately 400 of those who voted, when and where they voted, and the certification and signature (for those who voted by mail). The letter also requests that Sherrill preserve "any and all records relating to today's disclosure."
In addition, the letter states that the DOJ will inform the U.S. District Court handling the case of United States v. Caldwell about today's revelations because they provide an "additional basis" for the DOJ to have access to New Jersey voter rolls. Later in the day, the DOJ submitted a "UNITED STATES' NOTICE OF ADDITIONAL BASIS" to the District Court.
On July 22, 2026, speaking with conservative political commentator Benny Johnson, Dhillon said:
The consequences of voting when you're not allowed to in a federal election can mean removal to your home country and worse — it's a crime. And you know people need to just stop cold in their tracks and not enable it. And shame on New Jersey for its sloppy and incompetent handling of this issue or worse.
On July 24, 2026, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill made the following announcement:
We are not in the practice of turning over this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it, I've seen it personally. They are working to weaponize personal data, and they don't have a reputation for keeping it private either.
Source:
Hausmann, Natalie. (July 24, 2026)"New Jersey won't give DOJ data on noncitizens erroneously registered to vote". Democracy Docket. Retrieved 2026-07-27.
On July 24, 2026, Marc Elias (Democracy Docket) posted a video on YouTube entitled "New Jersey Did Not Commit Voter Fraud" where he explains what's happening in New Jersey and how it relates to something similar that recently happened in Texas.
Elias begins by saying:
The legacy media should be ashamed for themselves in giving oxygen to this, that's suggesting somehow that what happened in New Jersey is proof of voter fraud. There was not voter fraud. Is proof of some conspiracy. There was no conspiracy. And that somehow, somehow that the solution to this is to let Donald Trump take over the voter roles.
On April 28th, 2026, the state of Texas made a startling admission to the federal government. According to a letter sent by the Secretary of State, quote, "We are aware of instances in which state driver's license records inaccurately reflect a person's current citizenship status. In addition, we have learned of individuals who were mistakenly registered to vote such due to clerical error by a voter registar even though they acknowledged on the voter registration application they are not US citizens."
I have been dealing with voter registration records for more than 30 years as a lawyer, as an advocate, as someone who litigates voting rights cases in court. And I'm here to tell you that it is not startling news. It is not breaking news. It is not something that should drive the national narrative that departments of motor vehicles make errors. That government workers, despite all of their best intentions, sometimes get it wrong. That large databases are not always entirely accurate.
And I could give you instance after instance after instance where Republican controlled states where this federal government, run by Donald Trump, has used big data to disenfranchise voters or otherwise make a mess of democracy. Why do I raise this? Because right now the Republican party is trying to sell you a narrative about what has recently happened in New Jersey that is frankly not fair to the people of New Jersey, to the people caught up in this, nor to the overall pro-democracy movement.
Elias continues (bold added for emphasis):
But these people in New Jersey, these non-citizens, they weren't trying to prove citizenship. In fact, they were flagging for the state of New Jersey they were not citizens. So nothing in the proof of citizenship requirement [that the Trump administration has been adamantly pushing for] would have prevented the error that we saw here because these people checked the box that said I'm not a US citizen. So there was no effort on their part to deceive anyone to the contrary. Nor would a voter ID law have done anything because as I've mentioned before driver's licenses don't prove citizenship.
So conflating the driver's license requirement to vote, conflating that somehow with this error is just a lie. I mean, it's just a damn lie. And the legacy media should be ashamed for themselves in giving oxygen to this. That's suggesting somehow that what happened in New Jersey is proof of voter fraud. There was not voter fraud. is proof of some conspiracy. There was no conspiracy. And that somehow somehow that the solution to this is to let Donald Trump take over the voter roles, right? I mean, that's that's ultimately where this quickly went.
So, like one of the lies that we keep hearing, one of the things that Donald Trump and the administration and their supporters keep repeating over and over again and which the legacy media is buying into way too often is this idea, well, it's a federal election and therefore the federal government, i.e. the administration, the executive branch obviously has an important role to play here in safeguarding. Let me say it again. The US Constitution gives states the authority to set the time, place, and manner of federal elections. It gives Congress the authority to pass legislation overriding the states. It does not give the president of the United States any authority, zero authority, not any authority anywhere to be found. Not whether he declares a state of emergency, not whether the state of New Jersey has a software glitch, not whether he doesn't like mail-in voting, it doesn't give him any authority. So when we start to look at agencies under his control, they don't have any authority either.
Elais explains what happened in Texas:
So I want to put up right in front of you a letter dated April 28th, 2026. It is on the letter head of Jay Nelson, the Secretary of State. You see it says the state of Texas with the the great seal of the state of Texas right there in the top and it is addressed to Andrew Davidson acting associate director fraud detection and national security US citizenship and immigration service.
And we got to go all the way down to sort of the bottom of the first page where we get to it. "We are aware of instances in which state driver's license records inaccurately reflect a person's current citizenship status. In addition, we have learned of individuals who were mistakenly registered to vote such as due to a clerical error by a voter registar even though they acknowledged on the voter registration application that they are not US citizens."
That's what happened in New Jersey, right? That's what happened in New Jersey is people who went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a driver's license, filled out a form, checked the box that said they're not US citizens, but nevertheless, due to clerical error, clerical error, they were registered to vote.
I want to ask you whether you heard the legacy media report on this letter. Was there wall-to-wall coverage by the biggest news outlets about Texas DMV registering non-citizens to vote? Have you heard the Department of Justice condemn Texas? Are you reading on social media that, you know, right-wing influencers believe that there was voter fraud and a conspiracy to allow voter fraud in the state of Texas in April? Have you heard any of that?
Because the right-wing conspiracy theorists, the election deniers, the vote suppressors, the Republican party, they see political advantage in beating up on a blue state like New Jersey, just like they saw an advantage in beating up on California when, frankly, all California was doing was counting its primary votes. I mean, Donald Trump was beating up on, on California. Jay Clayton, the the head lead federal prosecutor in New York City, went on CNBC to to cast doubt on the accuracy or the the legitimacy of the vote counting in California's primary based on nothing. Zero. Nothing. Because it's a state run by Democrats.
Elias sums things up:
It's not going to end with California. It's not going to end with any of these blue states. In the coming days and weeks and months, Donald Trump is going to continue to lie about our elections. He's lied about voting by mail. He's lied about early voting. He's lied about dropboxes. He's lied about foreign interference. He's lied about voting equipment, right? He, he, and of course he lied about the 2020 election. He lies about everything. And his supporters, well, they just go along for the ride and they amplify the lies and they retell the lies and they take administrative errors like what we saw in New Jersey and they blow them up and they take administrative errors like we saw in Texas and they ignore them because that is what they do, and that is what they are going to do between now and the midterm elections.
Commentary:
New Jersey election officials discovered a problem, on their own, without the help of the federal government.
The problem wasn't covered up, it was publicly announced by New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill.
The problem was caused by election-related software, NOT by 6,600 non-citizens committing fraud.
New Jersey election officials are correcting the problem.
THERE IS NO NEED FOR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO GET INVOLVED.
Period. End of story.
If there was no such thing as an election denial movement, started by Donald Trump, there would be no letter sent to Sherrill from the DOJ and there would be no lawsuits filed by the DOJ to get access to all state voter rolls.
Marc Elias makes two critical points.
First, he notes that having a proof of citizenship requirement (the SAVE America Act) wouldn't have prevented the New Jersey errors because the 6,600 identified people "checked the box that said I'm not a US citizen." Those people were not fraudulently claiming to be U.S. citizens, so having to prove that you are a citizen by showing an ID wouldn't have prevented the problem from occurring.
Second, he notes that the DOJ didn't "condemn Texas" for committing the same type of error that happened in New Jersey, and that social media "right-wing influencers" didn't scream voter fraud and spread conspiracy theories about what happened in Texas, even though the events are much the same.
It's important to note that the DOJ under Trump is 0-16 in lawsuits attempting to force states to submit their voter rolls to the federal government — the latest ruling taking place in Connecticut. The judge in that case is the seventh Trump-appointed judge to rule against the DOJ's voter roll campaign, bringing the total number of Republican-appointed judges ruling against to ten.
It's important to note that Texas is one of at least 16 states who have turned over their voter rolls to the federal government.
It's also important to note that in October of last year, the Texas Secretary of State's Office announced it had flagged 2,724 registered voters as potential non-citizens using the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. The names of those identified were sent to Texas county election officials, who were responsible for verifying each person's eligibility to vote under state law.
Read more about the SAVE database here.
Note that Texas county officials were the ones responsible for verifying eligibility. If voter rolls were submitted to the federal government, it would be the federal government verifying eligibility, which is one reason blue states are so adamantly opposed to handing over their voter rolls.
The fact that Texas has cooperated and already handed over its voter rolls to the federal government might be one reason why Dhillon and the DOJ have seemingly gone much easier on Texas compared to New Jersey.
Read more about the DOJ's efforts to obtain state voter rolls in a July 27, 2026 Democracy Docket article entitled "Trump DOJ said some states 'cooperated' with voter roll grab by providing public information. It sued other states for doing the same".
If the courts had been deciding in the DOJ's favor in at least some of the voter rolls lawsuits, and if Trump and the sycophants in his administration, like Dhillon, weren't "hell-bent" on attacking Democrats and blue states at the "drop of a hat," I might be less-inclined to label what the DOJ did as "weaponization," but that's exactly what it is. Texas, a red state, gets a "free pass" but New Jersey, a blue state, gets hammered.
Remember, all of this started with Trump's ongoing "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged" and "stolen."