Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill confirmed that a software error registered roughly 6,600 non-citizens to vote in New Jersey and that about 400 of them cast ballots, yet she spent much of her public response attacking President Trump's credibility on elections.
The admission landed five days after Trump warned in a prime-time address that tens of thousands of non-citizens sat on voter rolls in New Jersey and three other states. Sherrill's own disclosure validated the core of that warning: the system broke, illegal votes were cast, and nobody in state government flagged the problem for more than a year.
Between June 2023 and June 2024, software at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission automatically registered non-citizens to vote even when applicants pressed "no" on a keypad asking whether they were U.S. citizens. The system recorded them as eligible anyway. Roughly 6,600 people were added to the rolls through no action of their own, the New York Post reported, and fewer than 400 of those newly registered individuals went on to cast ballots in New Jersey elections.
Sherrill did not deny the numbers. She called the error "unacceptable" and said she was "appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen." She hired an independent law firm, CSG Law, to investigate the breakdown and announced plans to switch software vendors as early as next year. Her office said it was sending letters to people affected and working to remove non-citizens from the rolls.
But when pressed on what the episode meant for the broader debate over election integrity, Sherrill turned her fire on the president. Newsmax reported the disclosure came just five days after Trump publicly warned about non-citizen registrations in New Jersey, a warning Sherrill's own findings partly confirmed.
"I think that Donald Trump has done more to undermine free elections in this country than certainly anyone in my lifetime, including [Russian President] Vladimir Putin."
That was Sherrill's response, not to the software failure, not to the illegal votes, but to the man who flagged the problem. She added that Trump "has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity."
The deflection is worth examining. Sherrill stood at a podium confirming that her state's motor vehicle system had been silently enrolling foreign nationals for a full year. Roughly 400 of those people voted. And her instinct was to argue that the president who raised the alarm was the real threat to elections.
The Department of Homeland Security sent Sherrill a letter citing a far larger figure: 35,152 non-citizens potentially on New Jersey's voter rolls. That number came from a preliminary DHS review matching voter registration records against federal immigration data using names, dates of birth, addresses, and Social Security numbers, Fox News reported.
Across four states, California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, DHS identified more than 256,000 potentially improper registrations. California alone accounted for an estimated 190,832. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin asked state election officials to begin sharing records by July 24 to verify the findings before any enforcement action.
Sherrill pushed back on the 35,152 figure, saying her administration asked DHS for supporting evidence and "received nothing back yet." Her own investigation put the confirmed number at approximately 6,600, a fraction of the federal estimate, but still a figure that produced hundreds of illegal ballots. A DHS memo had previously flagged more than 250,000 illegal immigrants on voter rolls in states that resisted sharing data with federal authorities.
Mullin framed the stakes plainly.
"Allowing just one non-citizen to vote cancels the vote of one U.S. citizen."
The New Jersey Globe identified the vendor behind the faulty software as IDEMIA, a French firm that also provides identity verification services for TSA PreCheck and other government programs. The error was not subtle: applicants told the system they were not citizens, and the system registered them to vote anyway.
That malfunction ran for twelve months, June 2023 through June 2024, before anyone in state government caught it. Sherrill blamed her predecessor's administration, saying it was "unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light, demanded accountability, or took action when it happened years ago." She did not name the predecessor, but the timeline points to the administration that preceded hers.
Sherrill framed her own role as cleanup crew. "This failure didn't occur under my watch, but accountability starts now because the people of New Jersey shouldn't have to wait a year for a problem to get solved, or two years to learn it even happened," she said. Her team, she added, was examining "the process failures that occurred under the previous administration, and the guardrails we can put down for the future."
What she did not address: whether any of the roughly 400 non-citizens who voted have been referred for prosecution. The reporting contains no mention of charges, arrests, or criminal referrals. She also offered no detail on which specific elections were affected or what the margins looked like in those races, questions that matter when even a handful of illegal ballots can tip a local contest.
New Jersey is one of 23 states, plus the District of Columbia, that uses automatic voter registration through its motor vehicle bureau. That system is supposed to streamline lawful registration. When the software fails, it does the opposite, it contaminates the rolls and puts non-citizens in legal jeopardy for casting ballots they were never entitled to cast. The DOJ has warned election officials in all 50 states that allowing non-citizen voting could result in criminal prosecution.
On the same day Sherrill made her admission, House Republicans cleared a key procedural hurdle to advance elements of the SAVE America Act, legislation that would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. The House is pushing the measure through three separate tracks: attaching a voter ID requirement to a bill banning stock trades by members of Congress, advancing a blueprint for a stand-alone version of the act, and packaging it with a defense authorization measure.
The timing sharpened the contrast. Sherrill acknowledged that a broken system let non-citizens vote in her state, then argued that the president calling for safeguards against exactly that problem was the one undermining elections. Meanwhile, a federal judge recently struck down a New Hampshire law requiring voters to prove citizenship, illustrating the legal resistance that voter ID efforts face even as evidence of non-citizen voting mounts.
Sherrill insisted the illegal votes were scattered across party lines. "They were registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state," she said. She added: "We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed."
That claim is difficult to evaluate without knowing which races were affected and what the margins were, information Sherrill did not provide. In tight local races, a few dozen miscast ballots can change an outcome. Saying no evidence exists is not the same as saying the question has been answered.
Sherrill also invoked her personal biography to bolster her credibility on the issue.
"I've taken several oaths to support and defend our Constitution as a Navy pilot, a federal prosecutor, and an elected official. Election integrity is core to that oath. It's my duty as governor to make sure our elections are free, fair, and secure."
Those are strong words. They would land harder if Sherrill had not spent much of the same press conference arguing that the president who identified the problem, before she confirmed it, was the real danger to American elections. Investigations into blocked voter fraud probes in other states suggest New Jersey's case is not an isolated episode.
National Review noted that Sherrill's admission provides concrete evidence supporting Trump's broader claims about non-citizen voting and strengthens the Republican case for the SAVE Act. Sherrill herself acknowledged the non-citizens bore no blame. "Through no fault of their own, the system registered them," she said.
That framing raises its own question. If the system registered them and nobody caught it for a year, and roughly 400 of them voted, what accountability exists, for the vendor, for the state officials who oversaw the contract, for the predecessor administration that Sherrill says failed to act? Hiring a law firm to investigate is a start. But investigations without consequences are just paperwork.
Sherrill promised to switch vendors. She promised guardrails. She promised accountability "starts now." What she did not promise was that anyone, any official, any vendor, any administrator, would face real consequences for a failure that let hundreds of non-citizens cast ballots in American elections.
And she did not explain why her first instinct, standing over the wreckage of her own state's voter rolls, was to attack the man who told the country the wreckage existed. The DOJ has made clear that officials who allow non-citizens to remain on voter rolls could face criminal charges, a warning that now applies directly to New Jersey's situation.
When the person confirming the problem spends more energy discrediting the person who found it, voters have a right to wonder whose elections she is trying to protect.
