New Jersey finds 6,600 noncitizens registered to vote and hundreds voting
by Stephen Dinan, Lindsey McPherson · The Washington TimesThousands of noncitizens were added to New Jersey’s voting rolls, and hundreds of them even cast ballots in the state’s elections, Gov. Mikie Sherrill acknowledged Tuesday.
She said the noncitizens were allowed to register because of an “error” in the state’s software system that allows customers at its Motor Vehicle Commission to register to vote.
The governor, a Democrat, said a preliminary analysis showed roughly 6,600 voters were added from June 2023 to June 2024, and “fewer than 400” managed to vote.
She blamed her predecessor as governor, fellow Democrat Phil Murphy, for the problem, and called 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.”
She made the revelation 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 the Department of Homeland Security ran the state’s public voter file and identified 35,152 names it flagged as potential noncitizens.
Ms. Sherrill did not account for the discrepancy between President Trump’s claims and state figures.
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She complained that the president had “zero credibility” in 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 were not citizens.
Even though they checked “No” on the keypad at the motor vehicle bureau, the system still registered them to vote.
Ms. Sherrill said she has ordered the names removed and will replace the vendor that ran the state’s system.
She also took pains to say the noncitizens were registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters and were “scattered across the state,” in an apparent effort to downplay the risk that they could have swung the outcome of any close elections during the time they voted.
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J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel 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 Advisers 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 often show up to get one, then end up registering to vote — inadvertently. Then, when they get mail urging them to vote — or, in some states, automatically get sent ballots — they end up voting.
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“That’s a situation we’re finding in state after state,” Mr. von Spakovsky said.
Indeed, New Jersey neighbor Pennsylvania faced a similar problem with its DMV system, where it also prodded noncitizens to vote even after they had said they were not citizens.
The glitch had persisted from the mid-1990s until a 2017 fix.
After acknowledging the problem, Pennsylvania officials in 2018 sent letters to more than 11,000 voters challenging their eligibility.
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Pennsylvania is another state that balked at cooperating with the federal government to check its voter lists this year.
The Department of Homeland Security said it ran the state’s public file and identified 14,576 potential noncitizens’ names on the rolls.
The department also ran the public lists from Nevada, where it found 15,903 names, and from California, where it found 190,832 potential noncitizens on its rolls.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin urged the states, including New Jersey, to work with him to clean up their rolls.
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Stephen Dinan
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Lindsey McPherson
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