About 6,600 people who indicated they were noncitizens while obtaining New Jersey driver’s licenses and other state IDs were improperly registered to vote in 2023 and 2024, Gov. Mikie Sherrill said on Tuesday.
The governor, a Democrat who took office this year, blamed a Motor Vehicle Commission system software error but said a preliminary analysis showed that fewer than 400 of the people registered that way went on to cast ballots.
The revelation comes as President Trump and other Republicans continue to assert that voting by noncitizens is rampant in U.S. elections, even though it’s rare and, when caught, can be punished as a felony that can lead to deportation.
Sherrill said she has ordered that erroneously added voter registrations from that 2023-24 period be removed and is replacing the vendor who ran the system. She also is launching an investigation into how the error happened.
“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,” she said in a statement.
Phil Murphy, also a Democrat, was governor then. The Associated Press was making efforts to contact him or his representatives.
New Jersey is among several states that allow noncitizens to hold driver’s licenses and other state-issued ID cards.
Mr. Trump has claimed that more than a quarter of a million noncitizens were registered to vote in four states, though the administration has yet to provide details of how it arrived at that figure. Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said they were registered in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada.
The estimate that there are 250,000 noncitizen registered voters across four states was based on an analysis of commercial databases, a White House official told reporters Thursday. However, that method is likely to lead to false positives, significantly overestimating the number of potential noncitizens on voter rolls, according to David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
“I guarantee you, that data includes a ton of people, maybe even a majority of people, who are absolutely eligible voters, and states would probably be breaking the law if they remove those voters from the rolls,” said Becker, who is also a CBS News election law contributor.
The Center for Election Innovation and Research has found that allegations of noncitizens casting ballots or registering to vote typically “appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data.”
