New Jersey says 6,600 noncitizens reached rolls via software glitch
State election officials across the country say they are tightening their voter rolls as the Trump administration presses a campaign asserting that large numbers of noncitizens are registered to vote, a confrontation that officials worry could spill into the November midterm elections. President Trump’s prime-time address in July claimed that more than 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote; a day later, the Department of Homeland Security said the figure covered just four states: New Jersey, Nevada, Pennsylvania and California.
New Jersey’s disclosure became a centerpiece of the standoff. On July 21, Gov. Mikie Sherrill said 6,600 noncitizens had been added to the state’s voter rolls from June 2023 to June 2024, blaming a software glitch at the motor vehicle commission, which automatically registers eligible people to vote. While applying for a driver’s license, these people selected “no” when asked if they were U.S. citizens, Sherrill said, but “the system registered them anyway.” The number of those who voted was fewer than 400, she said, in a state with about 6.7 million registered voters.
Sherrill blamed French vendor Idemia, which provided the software to the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, and cited motor vehicle employees who “knew that this was going on and did nothing to remedy it.” Idemia denied responsibility, saying it built the system according to New Jersey’s specifications. Sherrill’s administration has hired a New Jersey law firm to conduct an investigation, and state Republicans have called for a legislative probe. “We’ve raised concerns about automatic voter registration from day one,” said Republican state Sen. Kristin Corrado.
The mistaken registrations have largely run through motor-voter programs, which in about half the states automatically register eligible people applying for driver’s licenses or state identification cards. In Oregon, state officials acknowledged in 2024 problems at the state department of motor vehicles that resulted in 1,945 people being registered without proof of eligibility, including some noncitizens; 44 cast ballots. Officials said staffers at the DMV counter mistakenly picked the wrong option from a drop-down menu, which has since been changed.
Motor-vehicle divisions “have long been forced into the business of voter registration, which is not their core business,” said Stephen Richer, a Republican and former county recorder for Arizona’s largest county. “Election administration and voter registration is an add-on thing.”
The Trump administration has pressed its case through the courts. It has sued New Jersey and 29 other states for access to their unredacted voter rolls, and federal officials say they believe the rolls could contain vast numbers of erroneous registrations. So far the government has lost all of those lawsuits, in rulings by at least 20 district courts and a divided panel on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and has appealed some of the decisions. The administration also has appealed to the Supreme Court for permission to proceed with an executive order for federal agencies to create lists of people they consider eligible to vote; a dozen Republican-led states filed their own appeal in support.
A federal judge has ordered the administration to take its mass voter verification system offline, saying it “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.” Another judge has ordered that four states that want to use the system should be able to do so.
The states have told DHS it has provided no methodology, proof or details they can use to verify its claims, and state officials say the agency can’t make an accurate assessment without access to the full voter rolls. A DHS official said the department looked at publicly available portions of states’ rolls and cross-referenced them with immigrants in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the official said. “We’ve put these governors on notice. States must work with us to ensure free, fair, and honest elections,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement.
State officials describe the scrutiny as acute. “I feel like I’m in a UFC chokehold,” said Francisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state in Nevada, one of the four states DHS named. “Everything we do has to be perfect.” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said his office takes an “all-hazards approach to planning for elections” and that this year includes “the possibility that our own federal government might in some way, indirectly or directly, interfere.”
On July 7, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights wrote to chief elections officials in all 50 states, warning that they faced criminal penalties for knowingly allowing noncitizens to remain on voter rolls. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general, said the letters were directed at state officials who knowingly failed to act. “This is not about administrative errors,” she said. Dhillon said the department is “offering technical assistance and legal guidance to any state that wants help ensuring its voter lists are accurate.”
Officials in several states pushed back. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who serves as chief elections official, wrote on social media, “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ,” and said in an interview that it seems no one in the Trump administration “wants to hear, or see, or be shown that we’re doing a good job.” In Idaho, division chief James Craig in the state’s attorney general’s office wrote that “Your insinuations of criminal violations of the federal election laws are not well taken” and, “Stop threatening your friends in Idaho.”
Other states said their own checks found minimal errors. In Pennsylvania, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, said the auditor general had recently inspected 200,000 voter registrations and found a single noncitizen enrolled. “Election integrity requires constant vigilance,” Schmidt said. Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said that when New Jersey announced its mistaken registrations, he immediately confirmed his state didn’t use the same software vendor.
The stakes in the dispute are the November midterms. Democrats and some Republicans worry that even small errors in voter registrations will be used to challenge the outcome of contests, with the Democratic Party favored to reclaim a House majority and, possibly, the Senate. Sherrill said the number of noncitizens who cast ballots in New Jersey wouldn’t have changed any election’s outcome; former Vice President Kamala Harris won the state by more than 252,000 votes. David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said “The chances of a congressional race being decided by the margin of noncitizen voter participation are less than the chances of getting struck by lightning, but it has become a PR problem for Democrats.”
Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that since 2021 he has conducted several major audits of his state’s voter rolls to ensure noncitizens aren’t on them. “It’s really important that people have trust in the voter list,” he said. Raffensperger, who declined Trump’s 2020 request to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes needed to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia, lost the GOP primary for governor and will leave office after overseeing his final election. “We know that we are a bellwether state, we know it’s a very competitive state,” he said. “What we have been working on is squeezing out any potential areas where people could question the process.”
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, was more direct. “We know that we’re doing the best that we can for our voters, and we’ve got this wild pack of howler monkeys screaming about illegal voters with no evidence and no justification,” he said. White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said the entire Trump administration “will continue lawfully enacting the agenda President Trump was elected to implement, which includes the safety and security of American elections.”