New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill was handed an election security crisis that took place under her predecessor just days after President Donald Trump’s administration pushed out claims of widespread noncitizen voting.
Sherrill revealed Tuesday that about 6,600 noncitizens had been illegally registered as voters in New Jersey due to a system error in the state’s department of motor vehicle voter registration program under former Gov. Phil Murphy.
The governor said fewer than 400 of those people had voted. There is no evidence that their ballots changed any election outcomes, but the news has thrust the Garden State into the middle of the national debate over election security.
“This failure didn’t occur on my watch, but accountability starts now,” she said at a news conference Tuesday.
Here is what to know about what happened and how, and what the fallout could be — both in Trenton and in Washington.
How many noncitizens got registered in New Jersey and how many voted?
About 6,600 people who identified themselves as noncitizens were registered to vote in New Jersey between June 2023 and June 2024 “through no fault of their own” due to the glitch, though fewer than 400 cast a ballot, Sherrill said.
Sherrill said at a news conference that the error “was caught and stopped in 2024” but that her administration is now working to remove those hundreds of voters from the rolls. She said they could have voted in any elections since then but there is no evidence at this time that they could have swayed any results. She said they were registered as Democrats, Republicans, and mostly unaffiliated, and scattered throughout the state.
She said her team is “taking a hard look at the process failures that occurred under the previous administration and the guardrails we can put down for the future.” Through a spokesperson, Murphy declined to comment.
Sherrill, a former member of Congress who began her term in January, campaigned on changing the culture in Trenton and distanced herself from Murphy on the campaign trail but remained cordial with him. Her tone sharply changed this week.
“This entire situation is unacceptable,” she said. “It’s unacceptable that the vendor released software with such a glaring error. It’s unacceptable that the MVC [Motor Vehicle Commission] took a year to get this fixed, and it’s unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light, demanded accountability, or took action when it happened years ago.”
How did this happen?
Sherrill called the issue a “serious software error in New Jersey’s motor vehicle system.”
New Jersey began automatic voter registration in 2018, which allows citizens to be automatically registered to vote when they get an ID at the MVC unless they opt out.
The noncitizens who were improperly registered had answered “no” when asked on a keypad at the MVC whether they were a U.S. citizen, Sherrill said. But she said the system registered them anyway “through no fault of their own.” She said the error could put those individuals’ immigration status at risk. It would be hypocritical for the state to charge the individuals and she wants to protect them, she said, but she “would not put it past” the federal government to charge them.
U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a North Jersey Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for governor last year, called for a national audit into IDEMIA, the vendor whose software was used for the registrations.
But IDEMIA pointed a finger at the New Jersey Department of State, noting that while the vendor’s role is to transmit information between the motor vehicle and state departments, it is ultimately the state department’s responsibility to verify voter eligibility.
“Information submitted by IDEMIA must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections,” the company said in a statement.
When did Gov. Sherrill find out?
Sherrill said she learned about the error last Wednesday, the day before Trump’s speech. She announced the discovery on Tuesday.
What is Gov. Sherrill doing about it?
Sherrill said she immediately ordered an investigation when she learned about the issue and ordered the removal of the noncitizens from the voter rolls. She said that Rosalie Johnson, whom Sherrill appointed as New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission administrator this year, had already begun replacing the system vendor.
The governor said her administration hired an independent firm, CSG Law, to conduct the investigation. She said “they will be moving very quickly” and had already found the figures she has been citing. She said she will “present the findings” of the investigation to the public.
Johnson said she expects to launch the new vendor next year and is working on creating additional safeguards to regularly review information before sending it to the elections division.
Sherrill said her administration is looking at ways to make the state’s elections more secure and vowed to hold any government workers accountable.
“Should there be anyone that is identified that is still working in this space that has not done the right thing, I will hold them personally accountable for this,” she said.
How is the Trump administration responding?
The Trump administration and other prominent Republicans are using the issue to call for the passage of the SAVE Act, a federal bill that Republicans say would improve election security but Democrats warn would suppress millions of voters.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a post on X that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice “is investigating this unlawful dilution of American votes.”
Additionally, the department argued in a letter that the incident justifies the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain the state’s unredacted voter rolls.
Vice President JD Vance called on New Jersey U.S. Sens. Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both Democrats, to support the legislation in a post on X, given the issue in their home state.
“If only there was a way to stop this type of ‘software error’ that allowed non citizens to vote in our elections,” Vance said in the tongue-in-cheek post.
Booker said he trusts the Sherrill administration to solve the problem and criticized “those who will choose to weaponize this issue.” Kim declined to comment on the matter.
Why is the timing beneficial for the president?
The news came at an opportune time for Trump, just days after his speech in which he reignited conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss. The same day, the White House shared claims of widespread noncitizen voting, including in New Jersey.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that more than 35,000 noncitizens could be registered in New Jersey. The department has not shared how it arrived at that number, and experts cautioned it could include new citizens who have not been updated in a system meant to check work eligibility.
Sherrill said her administration received a letter with that 35,000 figure after Trump’s speech — which was also after she said she had learned about the 6,600 noncitizen voters.
“We have asked them for any evidence of this, where they got that number, who this is,” she said. “We’ve received nothing back yet.”
Sherrill said that the president “knows that if he provides us any credible information we will of course investigate it” but that he has “zero credibility on the issue of election integrity.”
“For the past 10 years he’s cried wolf and peddled bizarre conspiracy theories about fraud with no evidence,” she said.
Trump called for the passage of a national proof of citizenship requirement Wednesday during a speech in Georgia, but he did not directly reference New Jersey.
How will New Jersey lawmakers respond?
State Sen. Anthony Bucco of North Jersey, the Senate Republican leader, said the state should “at the very least” suspend the automatic voter registration program until a full investigation is complete and next steps are made clear.
He also called on the state to enact a voter identification requirement.
New Jersey requires identification or a Social Security number to register to vote, and first-time voters who registered to vote by mail may need to provide ID at the polls. But overall, most voters do not need to show ID at the polls in New Jersey.
Republican-led efforts to enact legislation following this incident are unlikely to succeed in Trenton because Democrats hold a supermajority in the Assembly and a majority in the Senate.
Sherrill said at the Tuesday news conference that the problem is not with the state’s laws, but rather with how the state government has been operating — further pushing blame on her predecessor.
“I see no reason why our state cannot run our election system well and have a computer program that can operate well, and should any problem occur it should be caught quickly … it’s a problem with accountability,” she said. “It’s a problem with making sure government is effective and running well, and it really is a lack of responsibility.”
Has this happened before?
In 2017 Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia at the time, uncovered and resolved a similar glitch at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation in which all Pennsylvania drivers were asked if they wanted to be registered to vote regardless of citizenship status.
Schmidt said at the time that the glitch led to 168 noncitizens registering to vote in Philadelphia but that just 44 ballots were cast in the city as a result.
Schmidt has since said that noncitizen voting is rare and that the threat has been exaggerated.
Staff writers Michelle Baruchman and Abraham Gutman contributed to this article.
