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New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill revealed Tuesday that roughly 6,600 self-identified noncitizens were wrongly added to the voter roll ahead of the 2024 election — and President Donald Trump’s administration pounced to capitalize on the disclosure.
Within hours, a Department of Justice attorney sent a revamped request for New Jersey’s unredacted voter database to Dale Caldwell, the Garden State’s lieutenant governor and secretary of state.
And the department’s civil rights division launched an investigation and sent Sherrill a letter demanding within five business days information about the 6,600 people wrongfully registered as voters, and when and where up to 400 of them voted.
“Ensuring that U.S. citizens’ votes are not illegally diluted by noncitizens’ votes is of paramount importance,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general at DOJ’s civil rights division, wrote in the Tuesday letter to Sherrill.
The Justice Department has been seeking for the past year the state’s voter rolls, which include each voter’s full name, date of birth, address, and driver’s license or last four digits of their Social Security number. But the requests have been rebuffed.
The Trump administration sued Caldwell in February, accusing him of violating federal voting and civil rights laws. By not sharing the data, the suit said, the federal government can’t ensure that the state is in compliance with federal requirements for voter roll maintenance.
The Tuesday letter to Caldwell said the new information shared by Sherrill’s provides an “additional basis” to the request, wrote Jesus Osete, a principal deputy assistant attorney general at DOJ’s civil rights division.
“The Division must also verify that no other noncitizens remain on New Jersey’s voter rolls, in violation of federal law,” Osete’s letter said.
The roughly 6,600 people were improperly added to the voter rolls when applying for driver’s licenses and identification cards. Even though they checked “no” when asked if they are a U.S. citizen, they were registered anyway.
Fewer than 400 of these individuals voted, Sherrill said.
The erroneous registrations took place between June 2023 and June 2024, Sherrill said, and “through no fault” of the noncitizens who were registered due to a software glitch in New Jersey’s motor vehicle system, which processes the automatic registration when a citizen obtains an ID or license.
The Justice Department shared the letter it sent Caldwell with U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi who presides over the lawsuit.
“While it is currently unknown in which elections those noncitizens voted or whether the ballots those noncitizens cast affected the outcome of any race,“ the court filing said, ”Governor Sherrill acknowledged in a press conference the seriousness of noncitizens voting in American elections.”
But the disclosure did not lead Sherrill, a Democrat who took office in January, to change her position about sharing the unredacted voter data with the federal government.
“The Trump administration has a long history of weaponizing the Justice Department for political purposes and attempting to overturn election results,” Sean Higgins, a spokesperson for Sherrill, said in a statement. “Governor Sherrill has been clear that she will use all the legal tools available to her to protect New Jerseyans’ personal information.”
The announcement came less than a week after Trump delivered a prime-time address in which he repeated his grievances over his 2020 election loss, and claimed without evidence that more than 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and Nevada.
Republican officials used the New Jersey revelation to make the case for the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
“This is why we must confirm citizenship before anyone registers. Only US citizens should vote in our elections,” U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, R.-Pa., said on X in response to the Garden State’s news.
The Trump administration has also attempted to get the Keystone State’s voter rolls through litigation. A judge tossed out DOJ’s lawsuit against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt last month. The suit, which is nearly identical to the one against New Jersey, is one of 16 similar lawsuits that were dismissed by federal judges throughout the country, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
But this month, the Justice Department threatened to bring criminal charges against top election officials in all 50 states if they allowed noncitizens to vote. The letter threatening Pennsylvania officials was addressed to Schmidt, who again declined to share voter information.
“I take seriously the obligations under both federal and Pennsylvania law to ensure that only eligible voters have access to the ballot box and to see to it that Pennsylvania’s voter rolls are appropriately maintained and updated,” wrote Schmidt.
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Staff writer Aliya Schneider contributed to this story.
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