In case you missed it, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill—a Democrat—admitted Tuesday that 6,600 noncitizens had been improperly registered to vote in her state since 2023.

Of those, at least 400 voted in state elections.

It should be noted that 6,600 people being illegally registered to vote is no small deal. Several assembly races in the state were decided by much smaller margins.

Sherrill blamed a "software error" in her state's Motor Vehicle Commission computer system that somehow registered noncitizens to vote while giving them a state ID.

The company that handles the software said that the fault isn't its and that the voter registration process is entirely handled by the state.

Whoever is at fault here, the buck ultimately stops, or at least it should stop, with New Jersey's elected officials.

And that's where we get to the bigger part of this story.

For years we've been told that noncitizen voting in American elections never, ever happens. It's nothing but a conspiracy.

Now that New Jersey got ahead of a Justice Department probe and fessed up to the fact that thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote and at least hundreds voted in previous elections, the media has switched to "Republicans pounce, no fair" mode.

Yes, lots of seizing and pouncing and seizing some more. The worst part of this story is not the illegal voting, it's that it boosts Republican arguments about election integrity. You know the drill, no surprises there.

Democrats and the media have a strong, vested interest in dismissing stories about noncitizens voting. And let's be honest, they aren't too far away from going to the predictable endpoint of this debate by saying, "OK, so noncitizens are voting, but that's a good thing!"

But the country isn't there yet, and they know it.

And if one state "accidentally" registered a bunch of noncitizen voters it certainly raises suspicion that this kind of thing is happening elsewhere.

That would especially be the case in states with "sanctuary" status for illegal aliens and an enormous noncitizen population.

Now, if New Jersey and other states are acting in good faith, the revelation that many noncitizens really are voting should be a huge wake-up call.

If they want to make sure their elections are sound and banish all thoughts that the system is crooked, they should go the route of Florida.

After the 2000 presidential election, in which faulty voting machines in Florida threw the country into chaos, the Sunshine State took immediate and aggressive measures to address the failure and then some.

It got rid of the questionable butterfly ballots, cleaned up voter rolls, and created strict mail-in voting requirements, among many other reforms.

It even passed its own version of the federal SAVE America Act this year, which strengthened proof of citizenship voter verification requirements.

The result has been a stunning turnaround in a few decades.

Florida became a model for reform and now has a voting system that's both safe and efficient.

Of course, some on the left have been furious about the changes, but that's their problem.

That gets us back to today, where the noncitizen voting "glitch" is now a massive cloud hanging over not just New Jersey, but other states with questionable voting systems.

How many other "oopsies" are out there waiting until right before the Justice Department closes in to be suddenly uncovered? As White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Signal's Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell on Wednesday, what happened in New Jersey feels like the tip of an iceberg.

You can be sure that the Democrats will try to wave this off as a one-time issue, but they can't escape the reality that many states continue to do a poor job cleaning up their voter rolls and they are now on watch.

And so far, places like California have shown little motivation to take steps to ensure that their elections are truly as safe and accurate as can be.

That's why it's important that conservatives in Congress continue to push for the SAVE America Act or some kind of citizenship verification process and photo ID requirements.

They can't just let this issue go and hope for the best.

The argument that Senate Democrats have made that noncitizen voting is "exceedingly rare" just doesn't pass the smell test now.

It's happening, it's corrosive, it's seriously damaging the credibility of our elections, and far too many state leaders have no intention of fixing the problem. They need to be held to it. Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past."

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