Asoftware malfunction at New Jersey's Motor Vehicle Commission left roughly 6,600 non-citizens sitting on the state's voter rolls between June 2023 and June 2024, Governor Mikie Sherrill acknowledged Tuesday. Of those, state officials believe about 400 people actually voted.
The math doesn't exactly flatter the state. Sherrill, a Democrat who took office in January 2026, said she only learned of the failure on July 15 — more than two years after it began.
The root cause was almost absurdly simple. People applying for a driver's license or state ID told the system, via keypad, that they were not U.S. citizens. The software ignored that answer and registered them to vote anyway.
Those improperly registered voters weren't clustered in one place or one party. Sherrill said they landed across multiple counties and were spread among Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters alike.
Whether any of that mattered to actual outcomes is still unclear. Sherrill said her office has "no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed," though New Jersey has seen 13 elections since 2017 decided by 10 votes or fewer, according to Ballotpedia.
"We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed.
— Gov. Mikie Sherrill
The timing is awkward for Sherrill politically. Just a week earlier, President Trump used a prime-time address to claim nearly 250,000 non-citizens were registered across California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania — including an estimate of more than 35,000 in New Jersey alone.
Sherrill confirmed her office had received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security citing that same figure, but said the state has asked DHS to back it up and gotten nothing so far.
The White House wasted no time framing the New Jersey admission as vindication. Press secretary Abigail Jackson said Democrats and their media allies have long insisted non-citizens couldn't register or vote — and argued this case proves otherwise.
Who's to blame, and who's investigating
Sherrill didn't name her predecessor, Phil Murphy, directly, but she made clear where she thinks the failure originated — under the prior administration, which she said never flagged or fixed the problem.
"This failure didn't occur under my watch," she said, adding that accountability starts now rather than waiting years for problems to surface.
New Jersey has since hired an outside firm, CSG Law, to investigate the breakdown, and the state plans to switch voter-registration software vendors as early as next year. The vendor tied to the glitch, IDEMIA, is a French identity-verification firm that also supports TSA PreCheck.
Beyond the state-level review, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division has opened its own federal inquiry into the matter.
Sherrill still aims her sharpest words at Trump
For all the bad news about her own state's systems, Sherrill reserved her toughest language for the president. Asked whether Trump might point to New Jersey as proof elections are vulnerable, she argued he's done more damage to free elections in the U.S. than anyone in her lifetime — comparing him unfavorably to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and said he has "zero credibility on the issue of election integrity."
What New Jersey says it's doing now
State officials are moving to notify affected voters and remove ineligible names from the rolls.
✓ Sending notice letters to people improperly registered
✓ Working to purge non-citizens from active voter rolls
✓ Reviewing internal processes for future safeguards
"My team is taking a hard look at the process failures that occurred under the previous administration, and the guardrails we can put down for the future," Sherrill said.
The bigger fight over voter ID
New Jersey's admission lands squarely in the middle of a broader Republican push in Congress for stricter election-integrity rules.
House Republicans this week ccleared a procedural hurdle to advance three separate efforts tied to the SAVE America Act — including a voter-ID requirement attached to a bill banning stock trades by members of Congress, a scaled-back version of the SAVE Act itself, and a plan to pair it with a defense authorization bill. Both chambers are also weighing a third reconciliation package that includes a watered-down proof-of-citizenship requirement.
New Jersey Republicans, meanwhile, are calling for an overhaul of the state's automatic voter-registration system in the wake of the disclosure.
I've taken several oaths to support and defend our Constitution as a Navy pilot, a federal prosecutor, and an elected official. Election integrity is core to that oath.— Gov. Mikie Sherrill
For now, the scope of the fallout — and whether the DOJ's investigation turns up anything beyond a software bug — remains an open question. New Jersey says it's moving to fix the system by next year; whether voters, and Washington, are satisfied with that timeline is another matter entirely.
