Gov. Mikie Sherrill's administration revealed that 220 noncitizens had a documented history of voting in New Jersey elections, a number that emerged only after the state purged thousands of illegal registrations caused by what officials call a software "glitch."
The announcement, made Wednesday, put hard numbers behind a scandal that has dogged Sherrill for months. Her administration confirmed that 5,100 noncitizens have now been removed from the state's voter rolls and that roughly 6,600 noncitizens were improperly registered through the Motor Vehicle Commission's voter registration system. Of that total, approximately 340 cast ballots in at least one election, the Daily Caller reported. The 220 figure represents those with a longer pattern, a "history" of voting, not a single ballot.
Another 1,450 registrations have been temporarily marked "rejected" in the state voter roll system while county election officials review them. State officials say the "rejected" status prevents those individuals from casting ballots until investigations wrap up.
Sherrill, a Democrat, framed the response as proof of her administration's accountability. She did not frame it as a failure of the system she oversees.
"I said we would conduct a thorough, complete, and fair investigation, and that is exactly what we are doing. Because that is what accountable government looks like."
She then pivoted to blame, adding that the situation "stands in contrast to the Trump administration and Republicans, whose only interest has been in trying to use this issue for political gain." Sherrill's office did not respond to the Daily Caller's request for comment.
The mechanics of the failure are straightforward and damning. The MVC's voter registration software allowed individuals to mark "no" when asked whether they were U.S. citizens, and still mark "yes" to register to vote. The system processed both answers without flagging the contradiction.
Sherrill has called this a "glitch." The software company responsible pushed back on that characterization. A spokesperson for the unnamed vendor said the company had only followed the "design specifications as set out by the state." In other words, the system worked exactly as New Jersey told the company to build it.
That distinction matters. A glitch implies an accident, a bug no one intended. Design specifications imply a choice, or at minimum a failure of oversight so basic that it raises questions about whether anyone in state government reviewed the logic before the system went live. Fox News reported Sherrill's own words on the matter: "In the case of this error, some individuals indicated that they weren't citizens and weren't eligible to vote, but the software registered them anyway."
She also 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 Washington Examiner reported that the improper registrations occurred between June 2023 and June 2024.
The administrative cleanup has been accompanied by criminal consequences, though so far only a handful of cases. In May, four green card holders were charged with voting in federal elections in New Jersey. In early July, a 62-year-old noncitizen from Slovakia was charged with illegally voting in an election and with making false statements while applying for U.S. citizenship.
Those five cases represent a fraction of the 340 noncitizens who the state says cast ballots. Whether additional charges will follow remains an open question. The DOJ has opened its own investigation into the thousands of illegal voter registrations in the state.
New Jersey is not the only state grappling with this problem. Noncitizen voting cases have surfaced across the country, including charges filed in Michigan against noncitizens who voted illegally in the 2024 elections.
The Sherrill administration's numbers, 6,600 improper registrations, 340 ballots cast, may understate the scale. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested the problem extends well beyond a single software error.
"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 figure, drawn from a DHS letter, dwarfs the 6,600 registrations Sherrill attributed to the MVC system. If accurate, it would mean the software failure accounts for less than a fifth of the suspected noncitizen registrations in the state. The New York Post reported that the White House has seized on the New Jersey case to push for the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson put it bluntly: "Democrats and their media allies have repeatedly said it is impossible for noncitizens to register to vote, let alone cast a ballot. Time and again, they have been proven wrong."
The pattern is not confined to New Jersey. DHS estimates that up to 250,000 noncitizens may be registered to vote across New Jersey, California, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Individual cases of illegal immigrants convicted of voting fraud continue to surface in federal courts.
Pennsylvania, one of the four states flagged by DHS, has its own festering problem. The Public Interest Legal Foundation has threatened to sue the state's Department of State for refusing to hand over records on noncitizens in its voter rolls, despite four separate requests. Pennsylvania has already admitted it was offering voter applications to ineligible immigrants obtaining driver's licenses, a practice dating back to the 1990s. The state's former Secretary of State resigned after noncitizen voters began turning up.
PILF spokesman Logan Churchwell told the Washington Free Beacon: "This investigation could reveal the largest finding of noncitizen registered voters to date." He added: "If we want to get to the bottom of the foreign influence of our elections, we should look carefully in Pennsylvania, first."
PILF's prior investigations have already uncovered 5,550 noncitizen voters removed from Virginia's rolls, 40 noncitizens who cast ballots in Philadelphia, and over 600 admitted noncitizen voters in New Jersey, a figure that predates the current MVC scandal.
The Supreme Court weighed in on the broader question before the 2024 election, ruling that Virginia had the right to remove approximately 1,600 suspected noncitizens from its voter rolls. That decision overturned lower court injunctions that had ordered the names restored. The Biden DOJ had sued Virginia over the purge; a Biden-appointed federal judge initially sided against the state before the high court reversed course. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin called the ruling "a victory for commonsense and election fairness."
Federal investigators have also pursued noncitizens who voted in federal elections in other states, including Louisiana.
Sherrill's response follows a familiar pattern. She acknowledged the failure, expressed outrage, and then redirected blame, first to the previous administration for not catching the error, then to Republicans for politicizing it. "It's unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light, demanded accountability, or took action when it happened years ago," she said.
But the software company's statement complicates that narrative. If the vendor built the system to the state's own design specifications, the failure did not originate with a rogue coder or a random bug. It originated with the state's requirements, requirements that someone in New Jersey government approved.
Reporter Michael Casey, who has been following the case, raised the stakes on social media. "There were elections in Jersey where Democrats have won by 1 vote," he wrote on X. "What further proof do we need that the SAVE America Act is desperately needed?"
That question hangs over every tight race in the state. If 340 noncitizens voted, and 220 of them voted more than once, the margins in local and state contests deserve fresh scrutiny. Which elections were affected, and which offices changed hands, remain unanswered. Past federal investigations into voter registration fraud have revealed how little scrutiny these systems receive until the damage is already done.
Sherrill wants credit for cleaning up a mess. But the mess was baked into a system her state designed, deployed, and failed to audit for a year. Calling that "accountable government" requires a definition of accountability that most voters would not recognize.
