About 6,600 non-citizens were accidentally added to New Jersey’s voter rolls and about 400 cast improper ballots in recent elections, the state’s governor announced Tuesday.
Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, said this stemmed from a “serious” software glitch at the state Motor Vehicle Commission that began in 2023, which was before she took office. She said that even though these people indicated while applying for a driver’s license that they weren’t citizens, they were registered as voters “through no fault of their own.”
The governor made the surprise disclosure just five days after President Donald Trump’s address to the nation where he claimed there are far more non-citizens on the rolls than previously known.
Sherrill’s announcement validates some of Trump’s assertions and gives him a potent new datapoint in his push for further scrutiny of state voter rolls. It will also surely be touted by his allies who have pushed for more aggressive citizenship checks and other measures to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting in US elections.
But Sherrill’s explanation also underscored what election officials have said for years: when non-citizens get onto the voter rolls, it’s usually accidental or unintentional. And illegal voting by non-citizen doesn’t happen on a massive scale, as Trump claims. The 400 improper voters cast ballots in elections where millions of eligible New Jersey voters voted.
