BACKGROUNDER: Jeff Van Drew Is Running A Hearing On Voter Fraud After Trying To Overturn the 2020 Election & Paying A Convicted Ballot Fraudster To Run His Turnout Operation

Today, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ-02) is convening a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight hearing entitled “Restoring Election Integrity: Oversight of Voter Fraud in New Jersey,” yet no member of Congress has less standing to run it. Van Drew is the only member of New Jersey’s congressional delegation who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and in the five years since he has built a record of attacking American elections rather than defending them. To make matters worse, Van Drew paid a convinced ballot fraudster to run his turnout operation during the 2022 election cycle.

The hearing rests on pushing Donald Trump’s false narratives about voter fraud. The Trump administration told the country that as many as 35,152 noncitizens sat on New Jersey’s voter rolls, yet the state’s actual disclosure involved roughly 6,600 registrations from a clerical error in the motor vehicle system that began years ago and was corrected in 2024. Van Drew has never corrected the federal number, and he is using the space between the two figures to sell the so-called SAVE America Act, a Trump-backed anti-voting bill which even Republicans concede cannot take effect before November. Read more about Jeff Van Drew’s record on elections and democracy:

ELECTION DENIER VAN DREW HAS A HISTORY OF PUSHING FALSE VOTER FRAUD CLAIMS

Jeff Van Drew Has Refused To Correct The Record On Trump’s False Claims About Voter Fraud In New Jersey. In a July 16 prime-time address, Trump claimed DHS had identified roughly 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote nationwide. A DHS press release the next day assigned 35,152 of them to New Jersey, and Trump later claimed that “thousands and thousands” of illegal votes had been caught there. PolitiFact found no federal or state data supporting either the count or the legal status, noting that DHS itself said only that there “may be” that many. Van Drew, who chairs the subcommittee running the hearing, has always had the power to investigate DHS’ claim — yet he has spent two months amplifying it instead.

• Van Drew Knows The Real Number Is A Fraction Of The Federal Claim, But He Has Let The Federal Claim Stand Anyway. The New Jersey Globe reported that the 6,600 registrations the state acknowledged are only a portion of Trump’s figure and that the administration has never publicly released the data backing the larger estimate. The Governor’s office told reporters it could not determine how DHS arrived at the number. Van Drew even sent a letter asking Gov. Sherrill for “the exact number of affected registrations,” even though he has publicly accepted the president’s claims.
• Van Drew Insinuated Sabotage By New Jersey Officials Without Offering A Shred Of Evidence. Rejecting the state’s account, Van Drew asked Gov. Sherrill in writing how she knew the episode was “just a software glitch and not a nefarious act.” He produced nothing to support the alternative. The Republican Study Committee letter he led went further, treating the episode as proof that Democrats had lied all along about noncitizen voting across the country, and he has since joined Jim Jordan, Bryan Steil and Laurel Lee in demanding records from New Jersey’s vendor.
• The State Disclosed The Error Itself And Handed The Investigation To A Republican, Which Van Drew Dismissed As “A Political Hit Piece.” Gov. Sherrill disclosed the problem publicly on July 21, three days before Van Drew’s letter arrived, and referred it to former New Jersey Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa, a Republican who formerly represented New Jersey in the U.S. Senate. Her administration removed roughly 5,100 registrations and sent the remainder to county election officials. When Gov. Sherrill noted in response that seven of the House Republicans who signed his letter had themselves voted to challenge the 2020 electoral votes, Van Drew called her reply "a political hit piece.”

While Van Drew Hunts For Voter Fraud, The Operative His Campaign Paid $65,500 Is Sitting In Federal Prison For It. Van Drew has built a hearing around Trump’s claims about voter fraud by noncitizens, while one of the biggest documented, prosecuted, admitted cases in the state ran through Van Drew’s own reelection operation.

• Van Drew’s Campaign Paid Craig Callaway $65,500 While Callaway Was Running A Mail Ballot Fraud Operation. Craig Callaway, a former Atlantic City council president, admitted in federal court that beginning in October 2022 he paid Atlantic City residents between $30 and $50 to pose as authorized ballot messengers, collected the ballots they obtained, and had them cast for voters who never authorized it. Van Drew’s campaign paid Callaway’s firm $65,500 that cycle, including $25,000 in early October, the month prosecutors say the scheme began.
• Craig Callaway Is Serving Two Years In Federal Prison, And Van Drew Says He Knew Nothing About It. A federal judge sentenced Craig Callaway in July 2025. Van Drew was never charged and denies knowledge of the scheme, yet he has never explained how the operative he paid to turn out his voters was manufacturing ballots in his district at the same time.

Van Drew Is Just Using This Hearing To Sell A Bill The Senate Has Already Rejected Three Times. Van Drew tied the New Jersey episode directly to the SAVE America Act in his letter to Sherrill, demanding she state whether she supports documentary proof of citizenship, and he voted to pass the bill 218-213 in February 2026. The Senate has turned it away ever since: cloture on the photo ID provision failed 53-47 in March, the full measure failed as an amendment in June, and a stripped-down voter ID bill collapsed in August with only 52 Republicans behind it. Trump has demanded that Senate Republicans abolish the filibuster to force it through, and Majority Leader John Thune has said repeatedly the votes are not there.

• The Bill’s Own Lead Sponsor Now Admits It Cannot Take Effect Before November. With three weeks of Senate session left before the midterms, Rep. Chip Roy, who wrote the bill, conceded that "it’s an exercise on ’28 now." The Heritage Foundation’s own election integrity fellow told the same reporter there is no way to pass the bill, implement it nationwide and survive the resulting litigation before Election Day. Van Drew is holding a hearing for a bill that cannot govern the election it claims to protect.
• More Than 21 Million American Citizens Do Not Have The Documents Van Drew’s Bill Would Require. A national survey found that 21.3 million voting-age American citizens lack ready access to proof of citizenship and 3.8 million have none at all, with the burden falling hardest on younger voters, voters of color, and married women whose names no longer match their birth certificates. The bill’s photo ID list is narrower than the voter ID law of every state but Ohio, and it bars student IDs issued by state universities.
• Where This Policy Has Already Been Tried, It Blocked Far More Citizens Than Noncitizens. Kansas adopted a documentary proof of citizenship requirement after noncitizen registration there had been measured at roughly 0.002 percent of registered voters. The Bipartisan Policy Center found the requirement then stopped about 31,000 eligible American citizens, or 12 percent of all applicants, from registering to vote.

Van Drew Was The Only Member Of New Jersey’s Congressional Delegation Who Voted To Overturn The 2020 Election. Of the twelve New Jersey members in the 117th Congress, Van Drew alone voted to discard another state’s electoral votes. He has since called it a matter of constitutional procedure, yet he acknowledged to the Philadelphia Inquirer that the vote could be read as an endorsement of Trump’s stolen election lies.

• Van Drew Signed The Texas Lawsuit Asking The Supreme Court To Throw Out Four States’ Presidential Results. On December 10, 2020, Van Drew joined 126 House Republicans on an amicus brief supporting Texas v. Pennsylvania, which sought to invalidate the presidential electors of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over mail voting claims that courts had already rejected. The Supreme Court threw out the case the following day, holding that Texas "has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest" in how other states run their elections.
• Van Drew Voted To Reject Arizona’s And Pennsylvania’s Electors Hours After The Capitol Was Stormed, While New Jersey’s Other Republican Voted To Certify. Van Drew put his name on the formal objection to Arizona’s certificate, as the Congressional Record shows, then voted to sustain the objections to both Arizona and Pennsylvania after rioters had been cleared from the building. Rep. Chris Smith, the delegation’s other Republican, voted to certify both.
• Van Drew Pledged Trump His “Undying Support” The Week He Switched Parties And Has Run On Trump’s Endorsement Ever Since. Van Drew pledged Trump his "undying support" at the White House in December 2019, one day after voting as a Democrat against both articles of impeachment. In 2022 he won renomination with 85 percent and credited the endorsement, saying Trump "broke up the swamp."

Van Drew Voted Against Every Attempt To Investigate The Attack His Own Objection Helped Justify. Having voted to throw out two states’ electors because Americans supposedly lacked faith in the count, Van Drew then opposed every mechanism Congress built to establish what had actually happened.

• Van Drew Was The Only New Jersey House Member To Vote Against An Independent January 6 Commission. The House passed the bill creating a 9/11-style commission 252-175 in May 2021 with 35 Republicans in support, including Smith. Van Drew voted no and was alone in the delegation in doing so.
• Van Drew Voted To Let Steve Bannon Defy A Congressional Subpoena. In October 2021 the House voted 229-202 to hold Bannon in criminal contempt for stonewalling the select committee that replaced the commission Van Drew had blocked. Nine Republicans crossed over; Van Drew was not among them.
• Van Drew Voted To Keep Marjorie Taylor Greene On Her Committees After She Promoted Conspiracy Theories And Called For Executing Democratic Leaders. In February 2021, eleven Republicans joined Democrats to strip Greene of her assignments. Van Drew voted to let her keep them; Smith voted to remove her.

Van Drew’s 2020 Fraud Claims Tracked Trump’s Messaging Rather Than Any Evidence. Van Drew has never produced evidence for the claims he repeats, and the audits that do exist point the other way:

• Van Drew Went On Fox Business And Claimed He Had Spoken With “Large Numbers” Of Dead Voters. One day after Trump pledged to eliminate mail voting before the midterms, Van Drew called the 2020 election a debacle, said ballots had gone to people who were dead, and then described them as “real people I spoke to, large numbers of them.”
• Every Serious Audit Of Noncitizen Voting Finds The Problem Van Drew Describes Does Not Exist At Scale. Election officials overseeing 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in 2016 referred just 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting, or 0.0001 percent of ballots cast. Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state concluded after reviewing rolls going back to the 1980s that noncitizen registration is not a systemic problem there. Utah’s year-long review of more than two million registrations turned up 27 confirmed noncitizen registrations, and federal citizenship checks return noncitizen results in 0.04 percent of cases.
• Even The Heritage Foundation’s Own Fraud Database Undercuts Van Drew. The conservative Heritage Foundation maintains the most-cited catalog of American election fraud cases. FactCheck.org reports that across more than four decades, since 1982, the database has documented a little over 100 cases of noncitizens convicted of illegally voting or registering to vote anywhere in the United States.