New Jersey says 'error' led to hundreds of non-citizens voting
By Chris Wade
The Center Square
New Jersey says a "software error" allowed the state to register thousands of non-US citizens to vote, and that about 400 of them wrongly cast ballots in recent elections.
In the bombshell disclosure by Gov. Mikie Sherrill on Tuesday, the Democrat said between June 2023 and 2024 about 6,600 people indicated when they were applying for a state driver's license or identification card that they were not U.S. citizens, but the state Motor Vehicle Commission's software system ended up registering them to vote "through no fault of their own."
Sherrill, a former lawmaker who took office in January, said the software blunder occurred under then Gov. Phil Murphy's administration and that she discovered it only last week. She asked the state's legal counsel to conduct an investigation, the findings of which she revealed on Tuesday. She said the vendor will be replaced.
"I am appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen," Sherrill said in a statement. "This failure didn't occur under my watch, but accountability starts now."
Like many states, New Jersey has a system where eligible voters can register when they are renewing or getting their driver's license or state ID. The non-citizens who eventually voted in state elections were registered as Democrats or Republicans or as unaffiliated, according to the Sherrill administration.
Sherrill said those registrations have already been purged, but she didn't disclose which elections the ballots were cast in or whether they could have affected the outcome of any race.
The embarrassing disclosure comes as President Donald Trump pushes Congress to pass strict new voter-ID and proof-of-citizenship rules.
Last week, the president held a primetime press conference where claimed that voter fraud was rampant. Trump claimed that about 250,000 non-citizens were registered across New Jersey, California, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
New Jersey Republicans have been warning about voter fraud in the system for years and said Tuesday that the findings of the investigation vindicate their claims.
"Now we are learning that a catastrophic government failure allowed thousands of non-citizens to be registered to vote, and suddenly everyone is acting surprised," state Sen. Kristin Corrado, R-Bergen, Essex, Passaic, said in a statement. "Democrats wrote this law, Democrats implemented this process, and Democrats failed to fix the obvious problems that followed."
They renewed demands on Democrats who control the state Legislature to take up GOP legislation to tighten the state's election laws.
But in her disclosure, Sherrill criticized Trump and accused him of seeking to "weaponize elections for political gain" and claiming he has "zero credibility on the issue of election integrity."
“For more than ten years, he has worked to undermine Americans’ faith in our elections by spreading lies about legitimate election results, attempting to overturn a free and fair election, encouraging an attack on our Capitol when he couldn’t accept the will of the voters, and defunding election security at the federal level,” she said.
Sherrill the difference between her administration’s response to the scandal and Trump’s approach is that "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," Sherrill said. "That’s what accountability and good governance look like, and that’s exactly what my administration is doing."