SerpApi.Org
New Jersey is removing thousands of non-U.S. citizens from the state’s voter rolls, with state officials blaming a serious software error for the improper registration of the individuals that led to several hundred improper votes being cast.
Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill said Tuesday that 6,600 noncitizens were erroneously registered to vote when they applied for driver’s licenses and identification cards from June 2023 to June 2024. The individuals had indicated that they weren’t U.S. citizens on their applications to New Jersey’s motor-vehicle system, but the system registered them anyway, the state said.
“When we find a problem, we don’t hide it, deny it, or invent conspiracies. We investigate it, we fix it, and we tell the public,” said Sherrill, who took office in January.
The disclosure by New Jersey comes as the Trump administration is pushing to pass strict new voter-ID and proof-of-citizenship rules in Congress. President Trump has falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen and has urged Republicans to pass tighter rules before the midterm elections this fall.
The software in New Jersey, which was provided by a vendor called Idemia, was supposed to prevent non-U.S. citizens from becoming registered, the officials said. Fewer than 400 of the people have voted since they were registered to vote, and the voters were scattered across the state, the officials said. The voters cast ballots as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters, they said.
Idemia said in a statement late Tuesday that its role is to transmit information through the motor-vehicle system. It said that voter-registration data “is transmitted to the New Jersey Department of State, Division of Elections, which is ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote. Information submitted by Idemia must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections.”
Democrat Kamala Harris defeated Trump, a Republican, in New Jersey in the 2024 presidential election, winning the state by more than 250,000 votes out of 4.27 million votes cast.
Sherrill said she learned about the software error last week and asked her chief counsel to launch an investigation into the registrations, which occurred during the administration of Gov. Phil Murphy, also a Democrat. She also said she had ordered the removal from the rolls of any residents erroneously added between June 2023 and June 2024. The state has begun the process of replacing the vendor.
“I am appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen and the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time,” said Sherrill. “We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed.”
A Murphy spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The accuracy of state voter rolls has already been heavily contested ahead of November elections that will determine control of Congress for the remainder of Trump’s second term.
The announcement followed Trump’s White House address last week in which he said the Department of Homeland Security has concluded that 250,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in New Jersey, California, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a letter to New Jersey officials after the speech that a preliminary review found that as many as 35,152 noncitizens could be registered to vote in their state.
New Jersey, California, Nevada and Pennsylvania are among 30 states being sued by the federal government in a bid to force them to turn over their unredacted state voter rolls. Some resisting officials have said the demands violate privacy laws and exceed the federal government’s authority.
More than a dozen district-court judges—including several appointed by Trump—have ruled in favor of the states, as has a divided panel in one appeals court.
The second Trump administration has taken a barrage of actions focused on voter eligibility, and officials maintain that hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots could be cast by noncitizens and nonresidents and under the names of people who have died.
Federal officials say they are seeking to root out inaccuracies in the state rolls, particularly by comparing them to federal databases that contain the citizenship status of immigrants, as well as Social Security information and State Department passport data.
Voting-rights groups and legal experts say those databases are themselves inaccurate when merged and searched in bulk.
Write to Ken Thomas at [email protected] and Louise Radnofsky at [email protected]
