Gov. Mikie Sherrill confirmed that a motor-vehicle system glitch registered 6,600 noncitizens to vote in New Jersey, and roughly 400 of them cast ballots before anyone caught it.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced Tuesday that a software error in the state's Motor Vehicle Commission allowed 6,600 noncitizens to be added to the voter rolls between June 2023 and June 2024, and that approximately 400 of them actually voted in state elections. The admission lands squarely in the middle of a fight in Washington over the SAVE Act, a bill requiring proof of citizenship to register that Senate Democrats have blocked for the past two years.
According to Sherrill's office, the applicants had done everything right. When they applied for a driver's license or state ID at the MVC, they answered "no" on a keypad prompt asking whether they were U.S. citizens. The system registered them to vote anyway. The vendor responsible for that system, IDEMIA, is now being replaced, the governor's office said.
Sherrill, a Democrat who took office in January, pinned the blame on her predecessor, Phil Murphy, whose administration ran the MVC when the error occurred. "It is unacceptable that no one in the prior administration brought this to light, demanded accountability or took action when it happened years ago," Sherrill said, according to NBC News. Her administration says the affected registrations have now been purged from the rolls.
The U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, opened an investigation within hours of Sherrill's press conference and gave the state five business days to turn over detailed records on the roughly 6,600 people improperly registered, according to RedState and Fox News. The DOJ has separately pressed New Jersey and other states for statewide voter data as part of a broader review of registration systems.
Republicans in Congress have spent two years pushing the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote nationwide. Senate Democrats have kept it from getting a floor vote, arguing existing safeguards already prevent noncitizens from casting ballots. New Jersey's own registration system just produced 400 noncitizen votes without anyone noticing for as long as two years. That is not a hypothetical Republicans invented for a floor speech. It is the exact failure mode the SAVE Act is written to close, playing out in a state whose senators have voted against closing it.
Sherrill has been careful to frame the episode as a technical failure, not an intentional scheme, and there is no evidence so far that any of the 6,600 people involved knew they had been registered or set out to vote unlawfully. Most told the state directly, on the record, that they were not citizens. The system ignored them. That distinction matters, and it should not be lost in the noise: this was New Jersey's government failing to process its own residents' answers correctly, not a case of people lying their way onto the rolls.
Were any races close enough to matter
New Jersey does not publicly break out how the 400 noncitizen votes were distributed by county or by race, and neither Sherrill's office nor the Secretary of State's office has released that detail. Whether any of those votes touched a margin tight enough to flip a result is, for now, an open question the state has not answered. Given that 400 votes spread across two years and presumably dozens of local, county and state contests is a small number in any single statewide race, the more immediate damage is to public confidence rather than to any specific outcome. But local and county races in New Jersey are sometimes decided by a few dozen votes, and until the state discloses where those 400 ballots landed, nobody can rule out a race that came down to noncitizen votes that should never have been counted.
The DOJ's five-day deadline for records will test how forthcoming New Jersey is willing to be. Dhillon's Civil Rights Division has signaled it wants precinct-level detail, not just the topline number Sherrill offered at her press conference. What the state hands over, and how completely, will determine whether this becomes a closed chapter about a vendor's bad code or a longer fight over who in Trenton knew what and when. Congress, meanwhile, has fresh ammunition for the next SAVE Act push, and it did not come from a think tank study. It came from a Democratic governor's own admission.
Also read: RNC widens six-state fight over voters who never lived there • Trump alleges China stole 220 million voter files as networks skip speech • House GOP unveils $95 billion reconciliation bill as hawks balk at no offsets
