By David Morgan
WASHINGTON, Sept 23 (Reuters) - US states may have added more than 30,000 self-declared non-citizens to the nation’s voter rolls since 2000 because of software glitches and clerical errors made while processing their driver's license and state ID applications, according to official records reviewed by Reuters.
The cases expose weaknesses in voter registration systems across a dozen US states governed by both Democrats and Republicans, but at numbers that experts said were too small
relative to the country’s more than 170 million registered voters to impact elections. Reuters was not able to determine how many of these non-citizens actually cast a ballot.
The findings suggest that inadvertent bureaucratic failures, rather than organized efforts to register immigrants illegally, are a major source of non-citizen registrations, and raise questions about whether legislative efforts to require proof of citizenship for voter registration would eliminate the issue.
President Donald Trump and his supporters have claimed, without evidence, that non-citizen voting is widespread and part of an organized conspiracy led by Democrats who hope to retake Congress in November's midterm elections, and are pushing lawmakers to toughen up voting requirements.
New Jersey announced the most recent high-profile case of errant voter registrations over the summer, saying a technology glitch added about 6,600 non-citizens to voter rolls between June 2023 and June 2024, even though they answered "no" when asked if they were citizens while applying for licenses and IDs.
Bureaucratic errors have also been reported in at least 11 other states – including Republican strongholds like Iowa, Texas and South Dakota - bringing the nationwide figure above 30,000 since 2000, according to the Reuters reporting.
A nationwide tally of such mistakes has not previously been reported.
Reuters used data from the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a non-profit group that tracks claims of non-citizen voter registration and voting, to identify states where self-declared non-citizens were registered. Reuters then verified the numbers with state officials, court records, and local media reports.
The data showed errors occurred in California, Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Virginia.
The numbers are inexact because state data is often tentative and subject to revision.
Such mistakes are likely a top reason non-citizens make it onto the nation’s voter rolls, according to Don Palmer, a senior legal fellow for election integrity at the conservative Heritage Foundation and former Trump-appointed chair of the US Election Assistance Commission.
"I think that’s the primary issue," Palmer said. "Driver's license agencies often make mistakes, and they often are not taking this as seriously as election officials." He said states also need to do more to verify voter eligibility.
SAVE AMERICA?
The White House has pressured Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a proposal to crack down on illegal voting that would require people to show proof of US citizenship to register to vote, and a photo ID to cast a ballot.
But it is unlikely such a bill would prevent the kinds of mistakes being made by state agencies, said David Becker, executive director of CEIR.
"In each of these instances, the individual did exactly what they were supposed to do. If there was some requirement that you had to show proof of citizenship, these problems would still exist, because the processes themselves failed," he said.
Proponents of the SAVE America Act say it is a common-sense way to ensure only eligible voters can cast ballots. Most states don’t require documented proof of citizenship.
Critics counter that the legislation's restrictions could disenfranchise millions of voters who lack easy access to passports or birth certificates, including low-income people and racial minorities, while creating unnecessary turmoil for the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
"This is not a problem," said Elaine Kamarck, an expert on governance at the Brookings Institution. "There's just no evidence that massive numbers of non-citizens are voting."
Immigrants do sometimes make false declarations about their citizenship in order to be registered to vote in US elections, according to the Department of Justice. But there is no evidence to show it is widespread.
A Reuters data analysis published earlier this year showed federal prosecutors have charged only 129 people under a federal "voting by aliens" statute created by Congress in 1996. In none of those cases did prosecutors allege a coordinated effort to influence an election.
The White House said non-citizen voter registrations were proof that US elections have been compromised and cited 11 arrests of non-citizens for illegal voting announced by federal authorities since May.
"The real story here is after decades of the media denying that non-citizens register and vote in our elections, they are finally being forced to admit after a flurry of recent arrests nationwide that it does happen," White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement.
AN OLD LAW
Underlying the glitches and human errors are state motor-voter systems that register people to vote when they apply for driver's licenses, state IDs and other government services under the National Voter Registration Act.
The largely Democratic initiative to address low voter participation passed in 1993 with bipartisan support under then-President Bill Clinton. Voter registration has climbed to more than 86% in 2024, from 62% in 1990, according to Census data and the US Election Assistance Commission.
Republicans claim that such state motor-voter systems have become a major problem, however, due to the doubling of the US immigrant population since 1990.
Automatically registering people to vote in this way "is irrational when you realize people that are not citizens in the United States are getting driver's licenses," said US Representative Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican who oversees federal election policy as chair of the House Administration Committee.
All 50 states allow legal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, while 19 US states and the District of Columbia also provide driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants.
FOREIGN PASSPORTS, BIRTH CERTIFICATES
Randall Marquis, a Canadian who lives in California, remembers the day when he got a card in the mail notifying him that he was registered to vote in the 2018 midterm elections during Trump's first term.
"I just said, ‘Well, this is stupid.’ So, I put it aside. But after thinking about it, I decided, no, it's more than stupid. This is bad!" the 71-year-old green card holder told Reuters.
He alerted news organizations, and state officials later disclosed that as many as 1,500 non-citizens had been mistakenly registered to vote by the California Department of Motor Vehicles due to a processing error, according to media reports.
State officials did not respond to Reuters queries seeking confirmation.
Similar problems have happened in Oregon where hundreds of immigrants who presented foreign passports and birth certificates were registered to vote because of clerical mistakes at the Department of Motor Vehicles, according to state records.
DMV officials also registered hundreds of American Samoans who presented US passports, not realizing that people from the US territory are nationals but not citizens, and therefore not eligible to vote.
In some other states, estimates of registered non-citizens have been initially overstated.
Just before the 2024 election, Iowa, for example, announced that more than 2,000 people had registered to vote or had voted in the state after self-reporting to the Iowa Department of Transportation as non-citizens.
Six months later, the number shrank to 277.
Iowa state officials said 35 non-citizens cast ballots that were counted in the 2024 general election. Overall, more than 1.6 million Iowans voted in that election.
The problems are bigger elsewhere. Since 2014, Virginia has reported hundreds of non-citizens each year on its voter rolls who identified themselves as foreign nationals, with a total of more than 4,500 in 2025 alone, according to annual reports by the state Department of Elections.
State officials say those numbers include people who later became citizens, and others who were stricken off the rolls.
Palmer of the Heritage Foundation said states should be required to address the issue.
"There's an obligation to fix the problem. So, take the politics out, and fix the problem," he said.
(Reporting by David Morgan; editing by Michael Learmonth and Richard Valdmanis)
