A serious software error at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission resulted in approximately 6,600 non-citizens being incorrectly added to the state’s voter rolls between June 2023 and June 2024, starting nearly three years before Gov. Mikie Sherrill took office.
Fewer than 400 of those people ultimately cast their votes, a senior Sherrill administration official told the New Jersey Globe.
When applying for driver’s licenses or ID cards, the 6,600 people explicitly answered “no” on a keyboard when asked if they were U.S. citizens. But they still registered motor vehicles to vote.
“Through no fault of their own, they were registered by the system,” Sherrill said in a statement obtained by the New Jersey Globe.
Sherrill will address the issue at a news conference at the Statehouse at 12:15 p.m.
The New Jersey revelation comes five days after President Donald Trump claimed in a prime-time address that up to 35,152 non-citizens were registered to vote in New Jersey. Trump claimed that there are about 250,000 non-citizens registered in New Jersey, California, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The governor said she became aware of the problem last week and immediately directed her chief adviser to launch an investigation.
“I have also ordered the removal from our voter rolls of any residents who were added in error between June 2023 and June 2024,” Sherrill said. “The new MVC administrator I appointed has begun the process of replacing the vendor responsible for managing the system.”
This provider, IDEMIA, is a large digital security and biometric identification company that operates TSA PreCheck enrollment services and provides identification technology to government agencies.
“Our preliminary analysis shows that fewer than 400 people were re-registered for the first time as a result of the error,” Sherrill said. “They were registered as Democrats, Republicans and independent voters and were scattered throughout the state.”
Those registrations have already been removed, but it remains unclear in which elections the ballots were cast or whether they might have influenced the outcome of a race.
Substantial responsibility for the extraordinary error lies with Latrecia Littles-Floyd, who served as acting MVC chief administrator during the time the erroneous registrations occurred. Gov. Phil Murphy appointed Littles-Floyd after Sue Fulton left the agency to take a position in the Biden administration.
Littles-Floyd also played a major role in disenfranchising several U.S. citizens who were temporarily removed from the voter rolls due to a separate MVC error. She consistently resisted efforts to fix this problem.
It remains unclear whether Littles-Floyd or senior officials in the Murphy administration knew about the software flaw.
Sherrill is expected to hold all current MVC employees involved in the outage accountable.
“I am appalled by the reckless mistakes that made this possible and the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time,” Sherrill said. “This error did not occur on my watch, but responsibility begins now.”
Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor, said election integrity was “fundamental to our democracy” and vowed to prevent a similar failure from happening again.
Sherrill also sharply criticized Trump, accusing him of trying to “use elections for political purposes” and saying he has “no credibility on the issue of election integrity.”
“For more than a decade, he has worked to undermine Americans’ trust in our elections by spreading lies about legitimate election results, attempting to overturn a free and fair election, encouraging an attack on our Capitol when he could not accept the will of the voters, and gutting federal election security,” she said.
Sherrill compared her administration’s response to Trump’s approach.
“The difference is simple: When we find a problem, we don’t hide it, we don’t deny it, we don’t invent conspiracies,” she said. “We investigate the problem, fix it and communicate it to the public. That’s what accountability and good governance looks like, and that’s exactly what my administration is doing.”
“New Jersey residents should have confidence that every eligible voter can vote, every lawful vote is counted and every appropriate step is taken to protect the integrity of our elections,” Sherrill said. “This is my responsibility and I will never stop fighting for it.”
This story was updated at 12:02 p.m.
https://newjerseyglobe.com/governor/new-jersey-admits-6600-non-citizens-were-on-new-jersey-voter-rolls-after-motor-vehicles-software-error/
