New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill blamed a software vendor for a glitch that registered roughly 6,600 noncitizens to vote, but the company fired back, saying the state itself bears responsibility for verifying who belongs on its rolls.
Sherrill, a Democrat, announced Tuesday that a "serious software error" in New Jersey's Motor Vehicle System had improperly added approximately 6,600 noncitizens to voter rolls between June 2023 and June 2024. Roughly 400 of those individuals went on to cast ballots. The governor ordered an investigation, directed her chief counsel to remove the erroneous registrations, and pointed the finger squarely at IDEMIA, the French multinational firm that has handled identity services for New Jersey's motor vehicle system for more than four decades.
IDEMIA did not accept the blame. The company told Fox News Digital that its role was limited to transmitting data, and that the New Jersey Department of State's Division of Elections holds final authority over who gets on the voter rolls.
The mechanics of the failure are straightforward and damning. Noncitizens applying for driver's licenses or state identification cards answered "no" on a keypad when asked whether they were U.S. citizens. The system was supposed to stop there. Instead, it pushed their information through to the state's voter registration pipeline.
Sherrill acknowledged the breakdown in plain terms:
"These individuals answered 'no' when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers' licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway."
The governor stressed that the error predated her administration by nearly three years and occurred under her predecessor, former Democratic Governor Phil Murphy. She repeated that point three times during her announcement, framing the scandal as an inherited mess.
But IDEMIA's rebuttal undercut her effort to shift blame onto the vendor. The company's statement was precise: "The voter registration information is transmitted to the New Jersey Department of State, Division of Elections, which is ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote." IDEMIA added that any information it submitted "must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections."
In other words, the state's own elections division had the final say, and failed to catch 6,600 registrations from people who had explicitly identified themselves as noncitizens. The question is not just why the software glitched. It is why no one on the state side noticed for a full year. New Jersey has faced growing scrutiny over noncitizens on its voter rolls for months, and this disclosure confirms the problem was worse than previously acknowledged.
Sherrill did not hold back in her language about the prior administration. "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. She also told reporters that it was "unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light, demanded accountability, or took action when it happened years ago," the New York Post reported.
The Republican National Committee spotted what it called a contradiction. In the same speech where Sherrill admitted more than 6,000 noncitizens had been registered, she characterized President Trump's recent address on election integrity as a "bizarre conspiracy theory about fraud," the RNC noted in a post on X.
That gap between Sherrill's own findings and her dismissal of broader election integrity concerns drew sharp responses from Republicans at every level.
New Jersey Assembly Minority Leader John DiMaio, a Republican from Hackettstown, tied the scandal directly to Democratic resistance to voter identification laws:
"This is another example of Democrats failing to secure elections. If Democrats would embrace voter ID, which has broad public support, the MVC's voter registration failures would have been corrected at the ballot box."
DiMaio added that "citizens deserve confidence in election results and Trenton Democrats have proven they do not respond to known problems in the voter rolls." His argument is simple: a basic ID check at the polling place would have caught voters the state's own registration system missed. Four green card holders have already faced federal charges for voting illegally in New Jersey elections, evidence that the state's safeguards have failed more than once.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson used the disclosure to press the case for federal legislation. "Democrats and their media allies have repeatedly said it is impossible for noncitizens to register to vote, let alone cast a ballot," Jackson said. "Time and again, they have been proven wrong."
Jackson called the incident proof of "the absolute necessity of the SAVE America Act," a bill designed to require proof of citizenship for voter registration in federal elections. That legislation recently cleared a key House vote, though its path through the Senate remains uncertain.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin went further, stating that New Jersey could have as many as 35,152 potential noncitizens registered to vote statewide, a figure that dwarfs the 6,600 Sherrill disclosed. "Just ONE illegal vote cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen," Mullin said.
Sherrill's announcement came five days after President Trump delivered a prime-time address highlighting election irregularities, including claims about noncitizen voter registrations across multiple states. Trump cited figures of 250,000 potential noncitizen registrations across New Jersey, California, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, Breitbart reported. Sherrill's own disclosure, confirming hundreds of illegal ballots in her state, landed days later.
IDEMIA is not a small or obscure firm. The French multinational provides identity verification services for programs including TSA PreCheck, and it had worked with New Jersey's Motor Vehicle Commission for more than 40 years. That relationship is now over. The state and IDEMIA will no longer work together following the scandal.
Sherrill's office, asked by Fox News Digital for further comment, offered a terse response: "We will let Governor Sherrill's remarks yesterday and her disgust at the failure of the outgoing vendor and previous administration speak for itself."
But the vendor's parting statement left a mark. IDEMIA made clear that it transmitted data, it did not decide who belonged on the voter rolls. That responsibility sat with the Division of Elections, a state agency that operated under Murphy's administration when the error occurred and continued under Sherrill's. The Trump Justice Department has put all 50 states on notice that noncitizen voting will be met with prosecution, and federal investigators have already begun examining the New Jersey situation.
Sherrill said the roughly 400 noncitizens who voted "were registered as Democrats, Republicans and Unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state." She offered no breakdown by party or by election. The state has not said which specific elections, primaries, generals, local races, received illegal ballots, or whether any of those ballots affected outcomes.
No one has explained why the Division of Elections failed to catch a year's worth of registrations from applicants who had explicitly declared they were not citizens. No one has said whether any of the 400 voters have been identified, notified, or referred for prosecution. The Trump DOJ has ramped up noncitizen voting prosecutions nationwide, and New Jersey's 400 confirmed illegal voters now sit squarely in that enforcement spotlight.
The technical cause of the software error itself remains unexplained. IDEMIA has not detailed what went wrong in the code. The state has not released any audit or forensic analysis. And the 6,600 figure covers only the June 2023 to June 2024 window, no one has publicly addressed whether similar errors occurred before or after that period.
Sherrill framed this as a problem she inherited and moved to fix. IDEMIA framed it as a problem the state was supposed to prevent. Both framings share one fact: for at least a year, New Jersey's election system accepted voter registrations from people who told the state, in plain terms, that they were not eligible to vote. And nobody caught it until the political pressure became impossible to ignore.
When 6,600 people say "I am not a citizen" and the state signs them up to vote anyway, the system did not suffer a glitch, it suffered a failure of basic responsibility. Voters who follow the rules deserve a government that does the same.
