New Jersey says it found a software glitch. Eggers says it found the tip of the iceberg.
The Government Accountability Institute’s Vice President challenged the Garden State’s attempt to contain the scandal after officials acknowledged that approximately 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote through the motor-vehicle system.
Eggers said Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s explanation addresses only noncitizens who correctly indicated they were not American citizens.
“What about the people who checked that they were a citizen?” Eggers asked during an interview with Grant Stinchfield. “She didn’t say anything about that.”
The software vendor has also disputed the suggestion that the registrations resulted from its technology alone, according to Eggers.
“You know who else is not buying it, as you said, that this is not a human error? It is the software company,” he said. “They came out with a statement today and said, oh no, it’s actually New Jersey human beings who still had to administer the system.”
Eggers argued that the state’s admitted total does not capture the potential scale of the problem.
He pointed to a Department of Homeland Security letter that he said identified between 19,000 and 35,000 New Jersey registrants whose names, addresses and Social Security numbers match known noncitizens in federal databases.
“She’s admitted, this New Jersey governor, to one small sliver of one type of way the non-citizens get on the rolls,” Eggers said. “But it’s much more widespread than that.”
Eggers also cited a DHS estimate of 190,000 potential noncitizen registrations in California and questioned why Democratic-led states including Oregon and Washington are fighting federal demands for access to their voter files.
“There’s no world in which the illegal immigrants only decided, you know, we’re going to get together and we’re going to target New Jersey,” he said.
Eggers identified motor-voter systems as a central vulnerability. When states issue driver’s licenses to noncitizens and simultaneously offer voter registration, the process relies heavily on government employees and applicants correctly identifying citizenship status.
“You notice they’re not taking any blame for the fact that illegal immigrants can register to vote on a regular basis because of the motor voter law,” Eggers said.
He argued that the dispute over voter files also exposes a broader contradiction. Blue states insist their rolls are secure while resisting federal efforts to compare them with immigration databases.
The answer, Eggers said, begins with audits, voter identification and passage of the SAVE America Act.
“The Save America Act is one such solution,” Eggers said. “We should be auditing the voter rolls.”
He added that DHS is already threatening to withhold federal funding from states that block citizenship verification.
“Between that and passing common-sense solutions like voter ID, those are two things that we can do now to make sure the elections this fall are as safe and secure as we were all told they were in 2020.”
Watch the clip above.
