Thom Tillis Torpedoed Voter ID and Now His Home State Is Paying the Price

New Jersey's governor admitted thousands of noncitizens were illegally registered to vote.

That state's noncitizens cast more than triple the votes now separating a congressman from defeat.

Virginia Foxx is trailing by ninety nine votes and nobody in Washington wants to talk about why.

The Software Error That Illegally Registered Thousands of Noncitizens

North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx trails Democrat Chuck Hubbard by just 99 votes in a rematch nobody has called yet.

She is not alone.

Republican Rep. Greg Murphy leads Democrat Raymond Smith by 233 votes in North Carolina's 3rd district.

Republican Rep. Brad Finstad trails Democrat Jake Johnson by 321 votes in Minnesota.

Republican Rep. Scott DesJarlais trails Democrat Victoria Broderick by 280 votes in Tennessee.

Four House seats, four margins smaller than a high school classroom.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced in July that a software error at her state's motor vehicle agency had illegally registered more than 6,600 noncitizens to vote after they told the DMV they weren't citizens.

Nearly 400 of them actually voted.

That is more than triple the margin separating Foxx from losing her seat outright.

Nobody has found evidence that a single noncitizen voted in Foxx's district, or in any of the other uncalled House races.

That is exactly the point.

There Is No Federal Database That Checks Any of This

CBS News anchor Lesley Stahl once pressed then-Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon on camera: "There are very few people who are noncitizen who end up voting. Very, very few."

Stahl's next question was why it mattered at all to go after them.

Politico ran the same line for months, calling noncitizen voting "overblown."

After New Jersey's admission, Politico changed its tune, writing there is "little to stop noncitizens from registering to vote if they want to, or even by mistake."

Reporters calling this paranoia had no answer once a sitting governor confirmed the numbers herself.

A federal judge in Oakland made the deeper problem explicit without meaning to.

Ruling against a Trump administration probe into noncitizen registrations across nine states, Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin found the government's voter data "voluminous and unreliable," adding there is "a high likelihood of error" because no federal database tracks citizenship status at all.

She ordered the investigation halted.

The investigation itself, known internally as the Unlawful Voter Initiative, was built around checking naturalized citizens against voter rolls pulled from state, local, and public records.

Agents were given as little as twelve minutes to clear each name during an August surge.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency has no intention of investigating anyone it believes is already a citizen, and is focused solely on removing noncitizens who vote.

The Department of Justice has sued 30 states for voter roll data so far and lost every single case.

Right now, a registrant only has to attest to citizenship under penalty of perjury.

Nobody checks it against anything.

Four Senate Republicans Joined Democrats to Kill Voter ID

The SAVE America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections and photo voter ID to cast a ballot.

The House already passed it.

Sen. Lindsey Graham brought it to the Senate floor as an amendment on June 4, 2026, needing 60 votes to clear.

It failed.

Four Republicans crossed over to help kill it: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, the very state now watching a 99 vote margin decide a congressional seat.

Graham's argument was simple: "There's no other reason to say you don't have to have an ID. It just makes cheating easier."

Sen. Alex Padilla called the existing honor system sufficient and compared voter ID to an attempt to "take over elections, to ban vote by mail."

North Carolina Minnesota and Tennessee Are All Still Up for Grabs

Four House seats sit close enough that a few hundred mistaken registrations could flip every one of them.

A close race doesn't make noncitizen voting less dangerous.

It makes it more dangerous.

Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, and Tillis had a chance to close that loophole before any of these races got this close.

They chose not to, and now a sitting congresswoman from Tillis's home state is finding out what that choice costs.

The honor system is still the system.

Nothing has changed since June, and nothing will change before the next count comes in.

Sources:

• Brianna Lyman, "House Race Separated By 99 Votes Shows Why 'Rare' Noncitizen Voting Does Matter," The Federalist, November 9, 2026.
• Maria Tedesco, "NJ Governor Says 6,600 Noncitizens Improperly Registered to Vote in 2023 and 2024," The National News Desk, July 21, 2026.
• Fox19, "Federal Judge Orders Trump Administration to Halt Noncitizen Voting Investigation in 9 States," Fox19, October 23, 2026.
• Fox News, "Four Senate Republicans Unite With Democrats to Block Trump's SAVE America Act," Fox News, June 4, 2026.