New Jersey's own Motor Vehicle Commission software secretly registered roughly 6,600 noncitizens to vote between 2023 and 2024, and apparently nobody in state government thought to mention it until now. Governor Mikie Sherrill announced the error Tuesday, confirming that fewer than 400 of those people actually cast ballots, and that the whole mess happened because a vendor's system ignored the answer 'no' to the question 'are you a U.S. citizen?' and registered people anyway. You genuinely cannot make this up.
The Software That Said 'Sure, You Can Vote' Regardless
Here is the basic, mortifying sequence of events. People applying for New Jersey driver's licenses and state ID cards were asked, on a keypad, whether they were U.S. citizens. They answered no. The system registered them to vote anyway. This went on for a full year, from June 2023 to June 2024, according to Governor Sherrill.
The vendor responsible for the system is a company called Idemia. Sherrill announced Tuesday that the state is replacing them. Idemia did not respond to a request for comment from NBC News, which, honestly, seems like a reasonable call when your software has been silently enrolling ineligible voters for twelve months straight.
Sherrill was careful to emphasize that the people registered this way bear zero responsibility. 'These individuals answered no when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen,' she said in a statement. The state screwed up. The state is fixing it. The noncitizens who got swept up in this are not being prosecuted, partly because Sherrill said it would be 'the utmost in hypocrisy' to charge people for a mistake the state made.
400 Ballots Cast, No Evidence Any Race Was Flipped
Of the 6,600 improperly registered, fewer than 400 went on to actually vote, according to Sherrill. She told reporters it remains unclear which specific elections those ballots were cast in. She was also explicit that there is, as of now, 'no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed' as a result.
For context, New Jersey has roughly 6.5 million registered voters. The 400 ballots in question represent a rounding error on a rounding error. That is not a defense of letting it happen. It is a fact that matters when you are trying to understand the actual scale of what occurred versus the political uses it will immediately be put to.
The registered noncitizens were not, CBS News points out, clustered in one party. Sherrill confirmed they were registered as Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters scattered across the state. Whatever the software error was, it was not a targeted partisan operation. It was just a very embarrassing technical failure.
The Prior Administration Has Some Explaining to Do
Sherrill took office in January of this year. The error happened under her predecessor, Democratic Governor Phil Murphy, whose tenure ran through the entire June 2023 to June 2024 window. Sherrill did not soften that point. 'It is unacceptable that no one in the prior administration brought this to light, demanded accountability or took action when it happened years ago,' she said.
Murphy did not respond to requests for comment from either NBC News or the Associated Press. That silence is going to get louder the longer this story runs.
Sherrill said she only learned about the issue last Wednesday, two days before Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent a letter to New Jersey alleging there were 35,000 noncitizens registered to vote in the state and giving the state two weeks to respond. Sherrill's office asked for the evidence behind Mullin's 35,000 figure. According to NBC News, they have heard nothing back.
The Trump Administration's Very Convenient Timing
The political backdrop here is not subtle. Trump gave a primetime White House address just last week pushing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would add new photo ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements for federal elections. His administration has claimed that more than 250,000 noncitizens are registered to vote across California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada.
That 250,000 figure, CBS News reports, came from an analysis of commercial databases. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a CBS News election law contributor, was direct about what that methodology produces: 'I guarantee you, that data includes a ton of people, maybe even a majority of people, who are absolutely eligible voters, and states would probably be breaking the law if they remove those voters from the rolls.' Commercial database matching against voter rolls is notoriously prone to false positives. It is not the same as what New Jersey found, which is an actual documented software failure with specific, auditable records.
When Sherrill announced the error publicly, Mullin responded on X: 'Appreciate you responding back to our letter. Looking forward to working with you to secure your elections in the future.' Very magnanimous of him, given that his department's letter cited a number five times larger than the actual figure, based on a methodology experts say is deeply unreliable.
Sherrill Is Not Handing Data to the Feds
Here is where the story gets politically complicated in an interesting way. Sherrill is being transparent about the error. She is launching an investigation, replacing the vendor, and removing the improper registrations. She is also, pointedly, refusing to hand personally identifying information about these individuals to the Trump administration.
Her reasoning is straightforward: the Trump administration 'continues to weaponize it against people.' Given this administration's track record of using immigration enforcement data in ways that have ended up targeting people with legal status or even citizens, that concern is not paranoid. It is documented.
Sherrill's statement was blunt about the difference between what she is doing and what the previous administration did: '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.' That is also an implicit rebuke of the federal government's approach to election integrity claims, which has involved a lot of very large numbers and very little actual documentation.
The Dingo Take
Let's be precise about what this story is and what it is not. It is a genuine, documented software failure in a state Motor Vehicle Commission system that caused real harm to election integrity processes. It happened under a Democratic governor who apparently never surfaced it publicly. The current governor, also a Democrat, found out about it and disclosed it within days. That is how accountability is supposed to work, and it is rare enough to be worth acknowledging when it actually happens.
What this story is not is confirmation that noncitizen voting is the rampant, coordinated threat that Trump has been screaming about since 2016. The people who got registered this way explicitly said they were not citizens and got registered anyway because software failed them. The same software has now been traced, audited, and the vendor is being replaced. That is categorically different from a deliberate scheme. The Trump administration's claim of 250,000 noncitizen voters across four states, built on commercial database matching that experts say is riddled with false positives, does not become more credible because New Jersey had a real but entirely different problem.
The useful number here is 400. That is how many ballots were cast by people who should not have been registered, in an election where millions of votes were cast, in races where there is no evidence the outcome changed. That matters. The software failure matters. The prior administration's apparent silence on it matters. What does not matter is using those 400 ballots to justify disenfranchising millions of eligible voters through the aggressive ID and citizenship verification requirements Trump is pushing, which, historically, have always caught far more legitimate voters than fraudulent ones. The bug got fixed. The cure being proposed is worse than the disease.
