Thousands Of Noncitizens On Jersey’s Voter Rolls Represent Just ‘The Tip Of The Iceberg’

Backed into a political corner, first-term New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill held a press conference earlier this summer to let everyone know that she was on top of a preventable assault on election integrity. The far-left politician posing as a moderate told reporters that she was “appalled by the reckless failures” that opened the door to thousands of noncitizens showing up on the Garden State’s voter rolls. She was equally disgusted by “the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time.” “We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed,” Sherrill said. Nearly two months later, we still don’t know whether that’s true. We still don’t know if the sparse information the Sherrill administration has provided is true. That’s because the Democrat has been less than transparent about a number of things. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about, why this happened and why it took so long for the public to know about it,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, said this week during a Capitol Hill hearing on New Jersey’s voter registration debacle. Titled “Restoring Election Integrity: Oversight of Voter Fraud in New Jersey,” the hearing gave Republicans on the subcommittee the chance to shine more light on an issue that Democrats desperately want to keep in the dark, while offering subcommittee Democrats like the ever race-baiting Rep. Jasmine Crockett the opportunity to turn the whole thing into a sideshow on Orange Man Bad. Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, the insufferable blowhard rep. from Maryland, jumped in for his own dose of Trump Derangement Syndrome theater. In between the grandstanding, election integrity experts testified that the reported noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter rolls are likely just the “tip of the iceberg” in the Garden State — and in a lot of other states. That’s troubling less than 50 days until November’s general election. ‘The Problem is Built into the Process’ In late July, Sherrill held her “it wasn’t me” press conference to confess that some 6,600 noncitizens had landed on New Jersey’s voter rolls in 2023 and 2024 — and about 400 went on to vote. She has since amended the numbers, asserting that only about 340 of the 6,600 “accidentally” registered noncitizens voted. The state has removed and placed approximately 5,100 of the wrongly registered in “deleted status,” the governor said. Another 1,450 or so have had their registration status changed to rejected, pending further review. Sherill blames the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission’s longtime license printing vendor for what she has described as a software glitch. A spokeswoman for the firm, IDEMIA, which has contracts with several New Jersey agencies as well as the federal government, has said “there was no glitch or software error,” and the problem was not on the vendor’s end. Van Drew said the company has been cooperating with his subcommittee’s investigation; Sherrill and her administration have not. 6,600 Noncitizens Found On New Jersey Voter Rolls As Democrats Fight Against Voter IDhttps://t.co/tWu257xfQP— The Federalist (@FDRLST) July 21, 2026 Josh Findlay, senior fellow for secure elections policy at the America First Policy Institute, told the subcommittee that in some cases registering noncitizens to vote may have been a feature of the system, not a glitch. “In New Jersey, the problem is built into the process,” Findlay said. Election fraud, Findlay and others said, is a likely outcome of states like New Jersey that automatically register voters through their motor vehicle division, which also hands out driver’s license to illegal aliens. ‘The Problem is Bigger’ In May 2021, the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission extended standard driver’s licenses and non-drive ID cards to noncitizens. The blue state’s Democrat-dominated legislature passed the bill, which was signed in December 2019 by then Gov. Phil Murphy, another far-left Democrat. The law opened license and ID access to more than 450,000 illegal aliens of driving age, the MVC estimated. “Increased access to a driver license will do much to improve the lives of many New Jersey residents and enhance public safety,” MVC Chief Administrator Sue Fulton said at the time. “Our roads are safer when drivers are trained, tested, licensed, and insured.” Fulton also assured a legislative committee that noncitizens would not be able to register to vote. She was wrong. “The problem is much broader than the state admits,” Jason Sena, a New Jersey election law attorney, told the Judiciary oversight subcommittee. Even if Sherrill is right about the vendor software error, Sena said the problem isn’t limited to the alleged “glitch.” He said public records show that election offices in Hudson and Bergen counties, two of New Jersey’s most densely populated counties, confirmed that noncitizens registered to vote before and after the timeframe in question — between June 2023 and June 2024. “Records show noncitizens were permitted to register to vote outside that timeframe and through other nonMVC methods, which confirms as a matter of fact that the problem is bigger than state has admitted,” Sena told the subcommittee. Justin Riemer, president of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), testified that New Jersey did not design its automatic registration system to actually verify citizenship. The applicants were registered to vote even after they acknowledged that they were not citizens on the Motor Vehicle Commission form. The front end of the system, he told the subcommittee, relies solely on attestation of citizenship without any further verification. The Garden State is by no means alone. Checking ‘yes’ on a box is all that stands between election integrity and diluting citizen votes in federal elections. “New Jersey may be just the tip of the iceberg on this issue,” Findlay said of noncitizens showing up on the voter rolls in states that grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. ‘Not One to Trust’ According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 19 states and the District of Columbia have put laws on the books allowing illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses. Twenty-four states and D.C. operate automatic voter registration, which is supposed to automatically register “eligible individuals” to vote when they interact with participating government agencies. Election integrity experts say the overlap has proved problematic, as New Jersey’s noncitizens “glitch” underscores. Oregon runs the same backend opt-out registration system as New Jersey. The Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicle division in 2024 “discovered” staff misidentified nearly 2,000 registrants as U.S. citizens on its voter rolls. More human “errors,” this time involving the drop-down menu in the system, according to the Oregon Department of Transportation. “The mistake occurred in part because Oregon has allowed non-citizens to obtain driver’s licenses since 2019, and the DMV automatically registers most people to vote when they obtain a license or ID,” The Associated Press reported in September 2024, less than two months before the election. Leftist California’s statewide voter registration system “does not contain” a specific cancellation reason for non-citizenship. So, as The Federalist reported last month, the secretary of state’s office can’t say how many noncitizens have been removed from its voter rolls, if any, because it doesn’t track that information. In Tim Walz’s Minnesota, illegal immigrants could cast ballots if they show a valid state driver’s license, granted to them thanks to Minnesota’s inclusive licensure law. During a Minnesota House Fraud Committee hearing last year, Republican Rep. Patti Anderson asked point blank if that was the case. Minnesota Elections Director Paul Linnell couldn’t provide a straight answer. Spoiler Alert: The answer effectively is yes. “The exchange captures a significant issue facing Minnesota voters. If election officials cannot clearly explain how the system prevents ineligible voting, the public has every reason to question it,” Findlay wrote in a piece for Townhall. “A state’s election system that is lacking basic safeguards is not one to trust.” Minnesota, ground zero in the government benefits fraud fight, also permits voters to “vouch” for as many as eight other people at the polls — no voter ID, just personal attestation. The honor system. ‘That’s Called a Cover-up’ The Republican National Committee late last month sent legal notices to New Jersey Secretary of State Dale Caldwell and election officials in Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Somerset, and Union counties after they failed to release records related to noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. Findlay said that in May, two New Jersey senators noted individuals who identified themselves as noncitizens in the state’s online voter registration system were being prompted to vote. A month later the New Jersey GOP’s election integrity task force found hundreds of noncitizens registered to vote “at least 30 documented cases were uncovered of non-citizens illegally casting votes, in some cases in multiple elections and for many years.” It would seem Sherrill and the people in her administration, as well as the Secretary of State’s office, knew about ineligible voters on the states voter rolls long before the governor finally came clean Sherrill blames her predecessor, Phil Murphy, who pulled a Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes, claiming he knew nothing of the problem. The GOP’s findings and a letter from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin raising concerns about noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter rolls forced Sherrill’s hand, election integrity experts say. The governor didn’t come forward in the spirit of transparency, as she has insisted. Her CYA actions are not “what accountable government looks like,” as she has said. Sherrill has since doubled down, refusing to turn over to the Department of Justice the list of the hundreds of noncitizens she has acknowledged. She claims that the DOJ has “no legal basis.” Not long after, U.S. Judge Zahid Quraishi (a Biden nominee) ruled that New Jersey does not have to release its unredacted voter rolls. It was the latest ruling rejecting similar DOJ requests in 30 states. New Jersey, like the others, have cited privacy concerns. Republicans have said if the states have nothing to hide, they would release the information. “Ladies and gentlemen, in political terms, that’s called a coverup. It means you don’t want people to know what’s really going on,” Van Drew said. ‘A Handful of Votes’ Stephen Richer, the former recorder for Arizona’s Maricopa County booted by voters in 2024 Republican primary election, told the subcommittee that noncitizens on voter rolls is a non-issue. Richer, a Republican shill for the leftist “voter rights” movement who worked to water down his office’s key election responsibilities as he was stepping out the door, noted audits that he says confirm his belief that “noncitizens voting in elections is a minute phenomenon.” “Those who allege widespread noncitizens voting have little support for their position,” Richer, a senior fellow at the Trump-hating Cato Institute. That argument from the left and some Republican stooges is getting harder to stand by in the wake of increasingly dirty voter rolls, the surge in illegal immigration under the Biden administration, and a well-funded left-wing infrastructure mass registering voters in heavy noncitizen parts of sanctuary cities across the country. What is particularly disingenuous is the assertion that noncitizen voting is so minuscule it doesn’t impact the outcome of an election. As Findlay noted, in 2025 alone at least three New Jersey elections were decided by one vote or resulted in a tie. Elections can come down to one vote.So when hundreds of noncitizens cast ballots in New Jersey, we asked a pretty simple question: how did this happen?Instead of answers, the state has stonewalled us every step of the way. pic.twitter.com/UMu5g350xL— Congressman Jeff Van Drew (@Congressman_JVD) September 15, 2026 The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s website includes a running list of elections that ended in ties or were decided by a single vote. It has tracked 1,376 elections that have ended in ties nationally, and 533 that were decided by one vote mostly over the past 20 years. There have been 19 races — from New York to Hawaii — that have ended in a tie or in one-vote advantage this year alone. Many of the contests involved smaller elected posts on local boards, commissions and councils, but the tally includes referenda, primary and general elections for state legislative and judicial positions. Even the Center for American Progress, launched in 2003 as the leftist alternative to the Heritage Foundation and dubbed by Time Magazine as “Obama’s Idea Factory in Washington,” has admonished that “key elections often come down to just a handful of votes.” While Sherrill has said her administration has “no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed” by the hundreds of votes cast by noncitizens, we don’t know that. While the governor promised a “thorough, complete and fair investigation,” we have no assurances other than her word that such a “fair” investigation is happening. Based on New Jersey Democrats’ handling of the matter up until late July this year, why should anyone trust things will be different? Why, indeed, when New Jersey officials refuse to turn over the records. The Federalist has filed an open records request with the state seeking the voter registration files in question and communications between Sherrill and others about the debacle. Pass the Save America Act Riemer said New Jersey’s voter roll debacle is why congress must act. “First, it should pass real citizenship verification requirements,” the election integrity expert said, pointing to the SAVE America Act that has languished in the Republican-controlled Senate. “The SAVE America Act would bar a state from registering those who do not provide documentary proof of citizenship. And because the New Jersey [noncitizen] applicants presented none it would have kept them off the rolls,” Riemer said. But even narrower reforms directed specifically at motor vehicle registration would “plug a huge hole,” Riemer said. Automatic registration agencies should be required to offer voter registration only to individuals who provide proof of citizenship, he said. At the very least, they shouldn’t be offering registration to people who provide documents indicating they are not citizens. States, he said, should have to remove noncitizens just as they must remove deceased and nonresident individuals from their voter rolls. “It could also clarify that the National Voter Registration Act’s pre-election blackout periods restricting certain list maintenance activities do not apply to removing noncitizens,” Riemer recommended. New Jersey state Sen. Michael Testa, has called for the legislature to reconvene to pass a voter ID bill. Sherrill has signaled she would sign a voter ID bill if it lands on her desk. But Van Drew said it comes down to a simple question: Whose side are you on? The congressman said if Sherrill and other Democrat governors truly value transparency and accountability, why do they refuse to open the books on their voter rolls? “If there is nothing to hide, if there is nothing to see there, there should be no problem. Just turn it over,” he said. Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin. America First Policy Instituteautomatic voter registrationelection integrityElectionsf Restoring Integrity and Trust in ElectionsGov. Mikie SherrillGov. Phil MurphyHouse Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversightillegal aliensJamie RaskinJason SenaJosh FindlayJustin RiemerMinnesota Elections Director Paul LinnellNew JerseyNew Jersey Motor Vehicle CommissionnoncitizensOregon Department of Transportation.Rep. Jasmine CrockettRep. Jeff Van DrewTim WalzTrump Derangement Syndromevoter registration