New Jersey’s governor says 4,500 noncitizens will be removed from voter rolls
After disclosing last week that a software error at New Jersey’s motor vehicles division had improperly registered to vote some 6,600 noncitizens, Gov. Mikie Sherrill on Tuesday announced a series of remedial efforts, including a new informational website, a letter campaign designed to inform those who’d been affected and a manual process of removing improper registrations.
“Over the last seven days, we’ve moved aggressively on multiple fronts — reaching out directly to those affected and beginning the process of correcting the voter rolls,” Sherill wrote in Tuesday’s press release. The process of manually removing the improper registrations includes 4,500 people who’d self-reported as noncitizens but had been registered to vote after the Motor Vehicle Commission’s software malfunctioned, between June 2023 and June 2024.
Sherill said the remaining registrations have been referred to county election officials for additional review to ensure eligible voters aren’t removed from voter rolls: “We are taking this extra step because our initial review indicates that a number of these individuals may be citizens. That has been the case in other states where clerical and administrative voter registration errors have occurred, and we’re determined to get this right.”
Roughly 400 of the mistakenly registered noncitizens voted in elections, according to the governor’s office and news reports last week. The vendor, Idemia, has not admitted fault, noting in a statement to the press last week that its role was only to “transmit information through the motor vehicle system. The voter registration information is transmitted to the New Jersey Department of State, Division of Elections, which is ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote.” The state’s new website says the Motor Vehicle Commission is “in the process of” replacing Idemia with another vendor.
Sherill took the announcement also as an opportunity to double down on the state’s refusal to cooperate with the White House’s pursuit of state voter rolls. The Department of Justice has sued more than two dozen states and the District of Columbia for state voter data, but with scant success. A district court judge this month ruled against the DOJ in its pursuit of Connecticut’s voter rolls, the 16th consecutive ruling against the department. “From the moment I made this public and launched the investigation, Donald Trump and his followers have moved to weaponize the issue to advance their voter suppression schemes,” Sherrill continued in her announcement Tuesday.
A group of 19 House Republicans last week signed a letter to New Jersey’s governor calling the software error “a catastrophic breakdown of the most basic safeguard in our election system: ensuring that only eligible American citizens are registered and permitted to vote. How do you know this was just a software glitch and not a nefarious act?” The group pressed the governor for information, including about the state’s routine processes for voter-roll verification.
For some in the GOP, New Jersey’s error was validation of a claim that noncitizens are voting in great numbers, a claim that, even accounting for the 400 New Jersey residents who voted but shouldn’t have, remains unsupported. A database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, shows that the number of noncitizens who’ve voted in elections, over a span of decades, remains fewer than 1,000.
