“Well, you saw what happened. They caught thousands of votes in New Jersey where illegal aliens were allowed to vote. Thousands and thousands of votes.”

Remarks at Wheeler High School, Marietta, Georgia

The state's own count was fewer than 400 votes, not thousands. The day before he spoke, New Jersey's governor announced that a Motor Vehicle Commission software error had registered roughly 6,600 people who had said they were not citizens, between June 2023 and June 2024, and that fewer than 400 of those newly registered because of the error voted. Reporting on the announcement records that the registrations came from the commission's own keypad error while people applied for licences and identity documents, that the state did not plan to charge the voters because the mistake was the commission's, and that there is no evidence the votes affected any election outcome. For scale, the 2024 presidential margin in New Jersey was 252,498 votes.

Some illegal voting in New Jersey is established, and that is the claim's best defence. Homeland Security said four non-citizens had been charged with illegal voting in the state, one in 2022, two in 2020 and one in both 2020 and 2024. The department's July 17 release had also listed 35,152 potential non-citizen registrants in New Jersey from a preliminary review. Four charged cases and a preliminary list of registrations are not thousands of votes caught.