New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill confirmed Tuesday that the state removed roughly 6,600 noncitizens from its voter rolls, people who should never have been registered but who were eligible to cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election. Fewer than 400 of them actually voted.
The cause, Sherrill said, was a “serious software error” in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System that ran unchecked for a full year, from June 2023 through June 2024. Individuals who explicitly told the state they were not citizens and not eligible to vote were registered anyway.
That timeline matters. For twelve months, a broken system overrode the applicants’ own answers and placed noncitizens on the rolls, through a gubernatorial primary, through local elections, and right up to the eve of the 2024 presidential contest. The state fixed the glitch in June 2024 but, as Fox News Digital reported, did not publicly disclose the scope of the problem until now.
Sherrill, a Democrat who took office after Phil Murphy’s tenure, moved quickly to frame the failure as inherited. In a social media statement, she said:
“I am appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen and the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time. This failure didn’t occur under my watch, but accountability starts now. I am taking action to prevent anything like it from occurring in the future and make sure those responsible are held accountable.”
She said she learned of the noncitizen registrations last Wednesday and immediately ordered an investigation and the removal of anyone who should not be on the rolls. The New Jersey Division of Elections is carrying out that work now.
At her press conference, Sherrill described the error’s mechanics plainly. As Newsmax reported, the governor said of the affected individuals: “Through no fault of their own, the system registered them.” The state is replacing the vendor responsible for the software.
Sherrill also offered a reassurance that may ring hollow to voters who expect their ballots to carry full weight. “We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed,” she said, as National Review noted.
The governor’s preliminary analysis found that fewer than 400 of the improperly registered noncitizens actually cast ballots. They were scattered across the state and registered as Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters. No arrests have been announced. No referrals for prosecution have been disclosed.
The New York Post noted that the noncitizens had checked the “not a citizen” box on their state ID or driver’s license applications, and the system registered them anyway. That is not a close call. It is not a gray area. The applicants did the right thing. The state’s own software overruled them.
For every American voter in New Jersey, the math is simple: nearly 400 ballots were cast by people who had no legal right to vote. Sherrill says no election outcome changed. But the integrity of an election is not measured solely by whether the margin of victory survived. It is measured by whether every lawful voter can trust that only lawful voters participated.
The federal government has taken a growing interest in ensuring that trust. The Department of Homeland Security has ordered ICE to deport illegal immigrants who cast ballots in U.S. elections, a policy that puts real consequences behind a law that previously carried little enforcement.
Sherrill’s admission did not happen in a vacuum. It came days after President Trump announced that DHS had found approximately 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote across four states: New Jersey, California, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent letters to election officials in all four states presenting the department’s preliminary findings. DHS compared publicly available voter registration records with federal immigration data and uncovered thousands of potential matches.
The numbers are substantial. DHS estimates as many as 190,832 noncitizens are registered in California, 35,152 in New Jersey, 15,903 in Nevada, and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. The department also identified tighter matches, registrants whose names, dates of birth, addresses, and Social Security numbers align with noncitizens in federal records. Those figures stand at 81,336 in California, 19,497 in New Jersey, 8,576 in Nevada, and 8,594 in Pennsylvania.
Mullin asked state officials to work with DHS to verify identities before taking action. DHS described its review as preliminary.
The gap between New Jersey’s 6,600 figure and DHS’s 35,152 estimate raises an obvious question: is the software glitch the whole story, or just the portion the state has chosen to acknowledge so far? The Washington Examiner reported Mullin’s pointed response: “Just ONE illegal vote cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen. As @DHSgov reported last week, New Jersey could have as many as 35,152 potential non-citizens registered to vote.”
That discrepancy, 6,600 versus 35,152, has not been reconciled. Sherrill’s office has not explained whether the remaining roughly 28,500 potential matches involve different time periods, different data sources, or a problem the state has yet to confront.
New Jersey is not alone. The DHS letters targeted four states, and California’s estimated numbers dwarf every other state on the list. California officials have resisted federal scrutiny of their voter rolls. The state has fought a federal voter roll audit even as the Department of Justice pressed for full election records.
The resistance follows a familiar pattern. State officials in blue jurisdictions insist their systems are secure, dismiss federal findings as politically motivated, and then, when the evidence becomes undeniable, blame a software error, a vendor, or a predecessor.
Sherrill followed the playbook almost to the letter. In the same breath she acknowledged 6,600 noncitizen registrations and nearly 400 illegal votes, she turned her fire on President Trump. She accused him of working 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.”
Set aside the political rhetoric. The facts of this case are that a Democratic administration oversaw a motor vehicle system that registered noncitizens for a year, that the error was fixed quietly in June 2024 without public disclosure, and that it took federal pressure and a DHS review to force the issue into the open. Sherrill learned of the problem only last Wednesday, more than a year after the software was patched.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has moved aggressively to overhaul federal election oversight, including clearing out the Election Assistance Commission over its inaction on noncitizen voting.
Several critical questions remain. Who specifically was “in charge at the time” that Sherrill referenced, and will anyone face consequences beyond losing a state contract? Will any of the nearly 400 noncitizens who voted be referred for prosecution or immigration enforcement? Is a full audit forthcoming, or will the state treat 6,600 as the final number despite DHS data suggesting the problem runs five times deeper?
The state has not said whether the improperly registered voters cast ballots in local, state, or federal races, or all three. It has not explained how a system designed to screen out ineligible voters managed to do the opposite for twelve consecutive months without anyone noticing.
Election integrity failures are not limited to New Jersey. Maryland Republicans have pushed for a federal audit after 400,000 flawed mail-in ballots were sent to voters in that state, another example of a system breakdown that officials initially minimized.
Governor Sherrill deserves some credit for acting once the problem reached her desk. Ordering the removal of ineligible voters and launching an investigation are the minimum expected steps. But the timeline tells a less flattering story: the error ran for a year, the fix happened quietly, the public learned nothing for another year, and federal data, not state oversight, forced the disclosure.
The governor says accountability starts now. For the nearly 400 American voters whose ballots were effectively diluted by noncitizen participation, it started far too late.
When a system that is supposed to guard the franchise instead hands it to people who told the state they weren’t eligible, the problem is not a software glitch. It is a failure of the institutions voters are told to trust, and a reminder that trust, once broken, requires more than a press conference to repair.
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