Two noncitizens in New Jersey were charged with “illegally voting in a federal election and making false statements while applying for U.S. citizenship,” according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), in another example of the thing that never happens reportedly happening yet again.
Sixty-one year-old Jamaican national Patrick Terrence Reid and 49-year-old Danubis Bernat, a Venezuelan national, “were each charged by separate complaints with voting by an alien in a federal election and making false statements while applying for U.S. citizenship,” USCIS said in a statement. Both Reid and Bernat allegedly attested they were citizens when registering to vote.
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal, but the only thing standing between our free and fair elections and a noncitizen voting is a tiny square box on a federal registration form requiring applicants to attest under penalty of perjury that they are telling the truth about their citizenship status. Notably, that honor system appeared to have failed when Reid and Bernat applied.
Reid allegedly voted in both the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in person, and again in the 2020 and 2024 presidential contests via mail-in ballots. Bernat allegedly voted in person in the 2024 election. Both Reid and Bernat allegedly claimed on their citizenship applications that “they had never registered to vote or voted in any federal elections.”
The arrests come just weeks after it was revealed that roughly 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state. Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherrill said the illegal registrations (which occurred before she took office) were the result of a “software error” that “led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024. … These individuals answered ‘no’ when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway.”
A preliminary analysis showed hundreds of noncitizens voted, according to Sherrill. The governor claims to have ordered the noncitizens removed from the voter rolls, but the New Jersey Department of State refused to fulfill The Federalist’s request for the noncitizens’ voter records or to disclose the breakdown of their political party affiliation. Sherrill also refused to turn that information over to the Department of Justice.
Sherrill’s announcement came after The Federalist previously reported that at least eight of the state’s 21 counties’ voter rolls showed noncitizens were registered to vote, with several noncitizens stating they did “not understand” how they became “registered through the Department of Motor Vehicles, allegedly.”
New Jersey is one of 30 states the Department of Justice has sued for refusing to turn over voter rolls to be “cross-checked effectively for improper registrations.”
But none of this would be a problem or a concern if Democrats would support critical election integrity legislation.
Republicans have tried — to an extent — to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) to require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, as well as voter ID to vote. Currently the NVRA requires automatic voter registration at DMVs and — due to a bad Supreme Court ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona — prohibits states from requiring documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration forms.
Passing the SAVE America Act would fix the gaps in the NVRA and allow states like New Jersey to breathe a sigh of relief since they’d no longer need to worry about noncitizens erroneously ending up on voter rolls — and even voting. Noncitizens would not be able to register to vote unless they provided actual proof of citizenship rather than merely checking a box “yes” or “no” under penalty of perjury — which is what led to Reid and Bernat allegedly voting illegally in several elections.
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