I’ve spent years as a court-designated expert witness, and courtrooms teach you fast: Nobody wins on a hunch. You win on paper, records, timestamps, and sworn statements. For years, anyone who raised concerns about noncitizens on the voter rolls, ballot harvesting, or paid registration schemes got the same answer from the press and Democratic officials: conspiracy theory, no evidence, case closed. This summer produced the receipts, one after another: court filings, plea agreements, a governor’s press release, and a state audit.
Start in New Jersey. Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) announced that a software error in the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission registered roughly 6,600 people to vote after they told the state, on the record, that they were not U.S. citizens. The system enrolled them anyway between June 2023 and June 2024, and a preliminary review found nearly 400 cast ballots. Sherrill was not in office when it happened, and she did not bury it. But note what actually failed. Not a hacker. Not a foreign adversary. A bureaucracy that automatically registers people through the DMV, exactly the process critics warned would produce this outcome.
Then there’s the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a court nobody mistakes for conservative. The full court sitting en banc vacated an injunction blocking two Arizona election integrity laws: one canceling a voter’s old registration once he moves counties and another making it a felony to knowingly help someone vote who’s still registered elsewhere. Voto Latino and the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans argued the laws would chill their outreach. The court said they hadn’t shown a real injury. Arizona keeps its rolls clean, and that’s 11 judges reading a statute, not a partisan one.
Registration fraud isn’t confined to one state. In Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutors charged canvasser Samunta Shomine Pittman with 70 felony counts of filling out fictitious names on registration applications — she pleaded guilty and got probation on every count. In Los Angeles, federal prosecutors charged a longtime petition circulator with paying homeless people on Skid Row a few dollars a head to fill out registration forms, boosting her paid signature count — she agreed to plead guilty. And in Bridgeport, Connecticut, surveillance video from the 2023 Democratic mayoral primary showed a party official placing stacks of absentee ballots into drop boxes, violating rules on who may return another voter’s ballot. A judge called it shocking and ordered a new primary. The defendants retain the presumption of innocence, but neither the video nor the ruling is in dispute.
To be sure, none of this proves an election outcome flipped. Georgia’s secretary of state just ran a statewide ballot-image audit of the June 16 runoff, checking over 1.1 million ballots, and found only 23 discrepancies, a 99.9979% accuracy rate, every one on a hand-marked paper ballot. Not one machine-cast ballot had an error, and modern equipment deserves that credit. But machines only count what is in front of them. They can’t tell you whether the person who filled out the form was eligible to be on the rolls. Georgia’s audit proves the count is clean. It says nothing about who got counted.
OVER A QUARTER-MILLION NONCITIZENS ON THE ROLLS: WHY THE SAVE AMERICA ACT CAN’T WAIT
That’s the gap the SAVE America Act is meant to close. The House passed it in February by a 218-213 vote, requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections and mandating that states remove noncitizens from their rolls. It’s stuck in the Senate, short of the 60 votes it needs, while critics warn it could burden citizens who lack easy access to a passport or birth certificate. Funny how many of those same critics had no trouble demanding proof of vaccination to enter a restaurant during the pandemic. New Jersey is exactly the failure the SAVE America Act targets: an agency that let noncitizens onto the rolls because nobody verified anything beyond a checkbox.
None of these stories, on its own, rewrites a presidential election. Together, they retire a talking point. The people who spent a decade insisting that noncitizen registration, paid petition fraud, and ballot-handling abuse were figments of the Right’s imagination now have a governor, a federal appeals court, a county prosecutor, a state judge, and a U.S. attorney’s office confirming otherwise, in writing. The ask isn’t complicated. Only citizens should vote, voter rolls should be accurate, and anyone filling out a registration form or dropping off a ballot should have to prove they’re who they claim to be. That’s not a Republican talking point or a Democratic one. It’s the minimum a republic owes itself.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Pennsylvania; and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.