The claim was made in Georgia on July 22 and is quotable in full: 'They caught thousands of votes in New Jersey where illegal aliens were allowed to vote. Thousands and thousands of votes' [1]. PolitiFact rated it Mostly False two days later [1].
Here is what happened in New Jersey. A software error in the motor-vehicle system improperly registered about 6,600 noncitizens between June 2023 and June 2024 [2]. Of those, fewer than 400 people cast a ballot in any election between 2023 and 2026 [2].
New Jersey has 6.6 million registered voters [2]. Four hundred ballots against 6.6 million registrations is roughly six thousandths of one percent of the roll.
'Thousands and thousands of votes' describes the registrations rather than the votes, and only by ignoring that the overwhelming majority of those registrations never produced a ballot at all [2].
There is a further problem with the description. A spokesperson for Governor Mikie Sherrill, Darwin Pham, said officials 'do not know their citizenship status, only the responses they submitted during the software error' [1]. That cuts against the state's own certainty about the 6,600 - and equally against calling them illegal aliens, since a lawful permanent resident is a noncitizen who is in the country legally and still cannot vote.
The error was found and fixed in June 2024, and not disclosed publicly until July 2026 [2]. That is its own accountability question, and a separate one from how many people voted.
