Nineteen House Republicans are pressing New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill for written answers about how roughly 6,600 noncitizens ended up on the state's voter rolls, and how about 400 of them cast ballots.
The lawmakers, led by Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, sent a formal letter to Sherrill on Friday laying out 12 pointed questions about the breakdown in the state's motor-vehicle registration system. The letter, obtained by Breitbart News, gives Sherrill until August 21, 2026, to respond.
At the center of the dispute is a simple question the Republicans want answered: How did people who told the state they were not U.S. citizens wind up registered to vote anyway? Sherrill's own administration disclosed that between June 2023 and June 2024, applicants for driver's licenses and ID cards who selected "no" when asked whether they were citizens had their information transmitted for voter registration regardless. The governor has attributed the problem to a software error by IDEMIA, the state's motor-vehicle system vendor.
But the House Republicans are not buying a tidy blame-the-vendor explanation. Their letter challenges that framing head-on.
"If accurate, this indicates the failure was not confined to a vendor's software error but extended to the State's own eligibility-verification process. This raises the question of why individuals who had affirmatively identified themselves as noncitizens were nonetheless validated and adjudicated as eligible voters."
IDEMIA has publicly said its role was limited to transmitting information collected through the motor-vehicle system. The state's Division of Elections, part of New Jersey's Department of State, was supposed to verify eligibility and approve or reject each submission. If IDEMIA's account is accurate, the state's own elections office failed to catch thousands of registrations that should never have gone through.
Van Drew did not hold back about what the episode means for election security. He told Breitbart News:
"This right here is exactly why we should require ID to vote in our elections. We need answers about how this happened, why it was not caught sooner, and whether more ineligible registrations remain."
Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger of Texas, who co-signed the letter, framed the issue in broader terms.
"Democrats cannot keep treating election integrity as negotiable when it is the last line of defense for our republic. We look forward to Governor Sherrill's prompt response."
Sherrill disclosed the problem publicly earlier in the week. She said she had learned of the error and "immediately" ordered an investigation and the removal of erroneous registrations. Her administration also began the process of replacing IDEMIA as the system's vendor. A preliminary review found that "fewer than 400 individuals" who were improperly registered actually cast ballots.
As Fox News reported, the governor noted the software failure occurred almost three years before she took office, a detail that distances her from the initial error but does not explain why the state's own verification process never caught it. The letter from House Republicans explicitly called the incident "a catastrophic breakdown of the most basic safeguard in our election system."
The error occurred under the previous Democratic administration of Gov. Phil Murphy. Just The News noted that Sherrill had previously criticized claims about election vulnerabilities before being forced to acknowledge the problem herself. In her own words, she said she was "appalled by the reckless failures that allowed this to happen and the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time."
The letter's 12 questions go well beyond the headline numbers. The lawmakers want to know whether any election, federal, state, or local, was decided by a margin smaller than the number of noncitizen ballots cast in that jurisdiction. They want a breakdown of the registrants' countries of citizenship and whether any single country represented a disproportionate share.
They also ask about the testing, quality-control procedures, audits, and certification requirements that were, or were not, conducted before the flawed software went live. And they want Sherrill to say plainly whether her administration agrees with IDEMIA's description of who was responsible for what.
Other questions press on accountability and transparency. The lawmakers ask whether all affected registrations have been removed or placed into ineligible status, and on what dates. They want to know what notices were provided to the noncitizens who may have believed, because of the state's own error, that they were legally permitted to vote. They ask whether Sherrill will release the complete investigative report, methodology and supporting data included.
The letter also asks whether the state will pursue reimbursement, damages, or contract termination from IDEMIA, and whether any state officials or contractors will be held accountable. And it asks whether Sherrill supports requiring documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, a question that cuts to the heart of the national debate over election security.
The Justice Department has already opened its own investigation into the matter. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, said the department was "investigating this unlawful dilution of American votes."
The federal probe has already hit a wall. National Review reported that Sherrill refused a DOJ request for the names, addresses, nationalities, and registration locations of the 6,600 noncitizens, missing the department's five-day deadline. The governor cited concerns about how federal authorities might use the data.
"We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it," Sherrill said. The DOJ responded by entering its letter to state officials as an exhibit in an ongoing lawsuit seeking access to New Jersey's electronic voter registration database.
That refusal makes the House Republicans' demand for cooperation all the more pointed. Their letter specifically asks whether Sherrill's administration will work with Congress, DOJ, DHS, and other federal authorities. So far, the governor's answer to federal investigators has been no.
The scope of the problem may extend beyond the acknowledged 6,600 figure. The Washington Examiner reported that DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin stated New Jersey could have as many as 35,152 potential noncitizens registered to vote, a number that dwarfs Sherrill's disclosure and suggests the software error may be only part of the picture.
Mullin put it bluntly: "Just ONE illegal vote cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen."
Vice President JD Vance seized on the disclosure to urge New Jersey's two Democratic senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, to support the SAVE America Act, legislation that would impose stricter requirements on voter registration. As of the article's publication, neither senator had publicly responded to Vance's appeal.
The DOJ has warned election officials nationwide that allowing noncitizens to remain on voter rolls could result in criminal charges, a warning that adds federal teeth to what had been a state-level embarrassment.
Sherrill's preliminary review found that the improperly registered noncitizens were "scattered across the state" and enrolled as Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters. That detail undercuts any suggestion the registrations were part of a coordinated effort to benefit one party. But it does nothing to answer the central question: why the state's own eligibility checks failed to stop a single one of the 6,600 registrations from going through.
The letter asks about administrative, technological, contractual, and legislative changes New Jersey plans to implement before the 2026 general election. With that election approaching, the timeline is not academic. Voters in New Jersey, and across the country, have a right to know whether the same system that registered thousands of ineligible people will be in place when they go to the polls.
New Jersey is hardly the only state grappling with noncitizen voting cases. But the sheer scale of the Garden State's failure, 6,600 registrations, roughly 400 ballots cast, a vendor pointing fingers at the state, and a governor refusing to cooperate with federal investigators, makes it one of the most significant election-integrity breakdowns in recent memory.
The 19 signatories span nine states, from Van Drew and fellow New Jersey Republican Christopher Smith to members from New York, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma. The breadth of the coalition signals that Republicans view the New Jersey debacle not as a local hiccup but as a national concern.
Sherrill has until August 21 to respond. Her track record so far, acknowledging the problem while blocking the federal investigation and deflecting blame to a vendor and a predecessor, does not inspire confidence that the answers will be forthcoming.
When 6,600 people tell a state government they are not citizens and the state registers them to vote anyway, the system did not glitch. It failed. And until someone in Trenton is willing to own that failure fully, every legal voter in New Jersey has reason to wonder whether their ballot was diluted by one that never should have been cast.
