Thousands of noncitizens got on New Jersey’s voting rolls and hundreds of them even cast ballots in the state’s elections, Gov. Mikie Sherrill admitted Tuesday.
She said they were allowed to register because of an “error” in the state’s software system that allows customers at its motor vehicle bureaus to register to vote.
The Democratic governor said a preliminary analysis showed roughly 6,600 voters were added between June 2023 and June 2024 and “fewer than 400” managed to vote.
She blamed her predecessor as governor, fellow Democrat Phil Murphy, for the problem, calling herself “appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen.”
“This failure didn’t occur under my watch, but accountability starts now,” she said. “I am taking action to prevent anything like it from occurring in the future and make sure those responsible are held accountable.”
Her revelation came just days after President Trump declared noncitizens on voter rolls to be a massive vulnerability in America’s election system.
He singled out New Jersey as one of four states that had refused to cooperate with his administration in checking its rolls, though Homeland Security ran the state’s public voter file and identified 35,152 names it flagged as potential noncitizens.
Ms. Sherrill didn’t explain the difference between Mr. Trump’s figures and her number.
But she did complain that the president had “zero credibility” on his claims and was trying to “weaponize elections for political gain.”
The governor said the state’s system refused to take “No” for an answer when people said they weren’t citizens.
Even though they checked “No” on the keypad at the motor vehicle bureau, the system registered them to vote anyway.
Ms. Sherrill said she has ordered the names removed and will replace the vendor who ran the system for the state.
She also took pains to say the noncitizens were registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters and were “scattered across the state” — apparently an effort to downplay the risk that they could have swung the outcome of any close elections during the time they voted.
J. Christian Adams, head of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which prods states to clean up their rolls, said New Jersey’s revelation undercuts the claim that noncitizen voting is inconsequential.
“This has been a problem for years. It’s hard to deny it now, and everyone should be on the side of fixing it,” he said.
Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and now a member of the Board of Advisors at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, blamed a 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act, for making it too easy for noncitizens to slip onto voter rolls.
Legal immigrants are entitled to a driver’s license and show up to get them, then end up registering to vote — oftentimes inadvertently. Then when they get mail urging them to vote — or, in some states, automatically get sent ballots — they end up voting.
“That’s a situation we’re finding in state after state,” Mr. von Spakovsky said.
Indeed, New Jersey’s neighbor, Pennsylvania, faced a similar problem with its DMV system, where it also prodded noncitizens to vote even after they had said they weren’t citizens.
The glitch lasted more than 20 years, until a 2017 fix.
After admitting to the problem, Pennsylvania officials in 2018 sent letters to nearly 8,000 voters challenging their eligibility.
Pennsylvania is another state that balked at cooperating with DHS on checking its voter lists this year.
But Homeland Security said it ran the state’s public file and spotted 14,576 potential noncitizens’ names on the rolls.
DHS also ran the public lists from Nevada, where it said it found 15,903 names, and California, with 190,832 names of possible noncitizens on its rolls.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin urged the states — including New Jersey — to work with him to clean up their rolls.
