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New Jersey mistakenly registered 6,600 apparent noncitizens to vote over the course of a year, including hundreds who went on to improperly cast ballots, according to Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D).
Sherrill attributed the incident to a software error on Tuesday, less than a week after President Donald Trump used a White House speech to argue that voting by noncitizens was a major problem. Studies have found that noncitizen voting is rare, but Sherrill's announcement shows that it does happen.
"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," Sherrill said in a social media post.
People who indicated on a keypad that they were noncitizens when applying for driver's licenses or identification cards from June 2023 to June 2024 were nonetheless registered to vote, Sherrill said. An initial review found that fewer than 400 of them later voted, she said.
The mistaken registrations occurred under the administration of Gov. Phil Murphy (D), and the underlying software glitch was fixed in June 2024, Sherrill said. She learned of the problem last week and ordered the removal of ineligible voters from the rolls, she said. The state is replacing Idemia, the vendor that oversees the system.
The registrations included Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters, the governor said.
A small number of ineligible ballots can affect the outcome in very close elections, but the state has not identified such occurrences, the governor said. Sherrill won her 2025 election by nearly half a million votes. In all, 3.3 million ballots were cast in that election, and 400 ineligible votes would amount to about one one-hundredth of a percent of all votes cast.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who oversees the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said in a social media post that her team was "investigating this unlawful dilution of American votes" in New Jersey. She asked the state to provide the names and addresses of the noncitizens who registered to vote within days.
Dhillon said she would also cite the incident as she tries to persuade a judge to compel the state to turn over its voter rolls to the Justice Department. The department has lost similar lawsuits seeking voter rolls in 16 other states.
New Jersey's error also gives Trump a new talking point as he pushes Congress to pass legislation requiring people to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. The measure remains stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate.
"American voters deserve to have confidence that our elections are safe and secure," White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
Trump contended in his Thursday prime-time speech that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are on the rolls across the country, a claim that election officials and experts called greatly exaggerated. Sherrill said in her post that Trump "has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity."
The day Trump made his speech, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent New Jersey a letter claiming that more than 35,000 people on the state's voter rolls could be noncitizens. Critics called that number inflated, but Mullin used Tuesday's disclosure to renew the administration's demand to scrub state voter rolls.
"Just ONE illegal vote cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen," Mullin wrote in a social media post.
Last year, federal prosecutors in New Jersey launched a task force to investigate instances of illegal voting, part of a nationwide push by the Justice Department to prosecute voting crimes.
Since then, that office has charged at least eight noncitizens with voting illegally in elections between 2020 and 2024.
None of those registrations appeared to have occurred during the recent period in which Sherrill said the state's motor vehicle system was erroneously logging responses to citizenship questions.
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