New Jersey glitch registered 6,600 noncitizens to vote, Sherrill says

Gov. Mikie Sherrill said a software error at New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission improperly registered roughly 6,600 noncitizens to vote, then allowed fewer than 400 of them to cast ballots in 2023 local elections.

Sherrill said the problem ran from June 2023 through June 2024, during the Murphy administration and before she took office in January 2026. The affected people were applying for driver’s licenses or non-driver ID cards and had indicated they were not U.S. citizens, but the state’s motor-voter system still pushed their information into the election database. New Jersey allows voter registration at motor vehicle agencies during license and ID transactions, and the MVC sends that information to the New Jersey Division of Elections.

The governor said she learned of the issue last week and described it as a serious software failure. Her administration has ordered noncitizens removed from the voter rolls and is working on fixes to the motor vehicle registration system. The fact that the glitch moved thousands of ineligible registrations into the system before officials caught it raises questions about how quickly the MVC and election officials can detect bad data when registration is embedded in routine licensing transactions.

The number of actual improper votes was far smaller than the number of bad registrations. Fewer than 400 of the 6,600 mistakenly registered noncitizens were later found to have voted, and those ballots were cast in local contests in 2023. Even so, the episode exposed a basic weakness in the state’s election-integrity controls: the system relied on an automatic transfer from the MVC to election officials, but the software error was not stopped before it reached the voter rolls.

Republicans have already called for an investigation into the failure. Sherrill also said she would not be surprised if the Trump administration prosecuted the roughly 400 people who voted, underscoring how a back-end technology problem at a state agency quickly became a criminal and political issue. The immediate challenge now is whether New Jersey can repair the registration pipeline fast enough to keep a one-year software defect from becoming a recurring vulnerability.