New Jersey Confirms 6,600 Noncitizens Were on Voter Rolls, Nearly 400 Cast Ballots

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced Tuesday that roughly 6,600 noncitizens were mistakenly added to the state's voter rolls, and that fewer than 400 of them actually cast ballots in past elections.

Sherrill, a Democrat, says the cause was a "serious software error" in the state's Motor Vehicle Commission system. According to Sherrill, people applying for driver's licenses or ID cards between June 2023 and June 2024 told the state, on the record, that they were not citizens and not eligible to vote. The software registered them anyway. The fix didn't happen until June 2024.

Accidental doesn't mean harmless. Nearly 400 people who told New Jersey they weren't eligible to vote cast ballots anyway.

What Sherrill says happened next

Sherrill says she learned about the problem last Wednesday and ordered an immediate investigation, plus removal of everyone improperly registered. The state's Division of Elections says it's still working through the rolls to strip out ineligible voters.

Sherrill says the roughly 400 people who voted were scattered across the state and mostly had no party affiliation, though some were registered Democrats and some Republicans, according to her press conference. There's no evidence presented so far that this tipped any specific race. "We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed," Sherrill said, as reported by TIME.

The Trump numbers don't match up

This all comes five days after President Trump's national address citing a Department of Homeland Security review claiming 250,000 noncitizens were registered across four states, including New Jersey specifically at 35,152, according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's letters to state officials, reported by WFMD. DHS said its number came from comparing voter rolls to federal immigration data, and it flagged roughly 19,497 New Jersey registrants as potential matches needing verification.

That 35,152 DHS figure is more than five times New Jersey's confirmed 6,600. DHS itself called its findings preliminary and, according to TIME, did not release the underlying data or explain its methodology, nor did it specify how many of its flagged registrants had actually voted. The Associated Press, reviewing the declassified materials behind Trump's speech, found they did not substantiate claims of widespread fraud or foreign manipulation of U.S. elections, per TIME's reporting.

Both things can be true at once: DHS's headline number looks inflated and unverified, and New Jersey's own confirmed number is not zero. Sherrill's disclosure actually validates part of what DHS was pointing at, just at a much smaller scale than Trump claimed.

Sherrill's political framing

Sherrill didn't just report the fix. She used the announcement to go after Trump directly, saying he has "zero credibility on the issue of election integrity" and accusing him of trying to "undermine Americans' faith in our elections," according to both Fox News and WFMD, citing her statement.

That's a fair political argument for her to make. But it doesn't change the facts sitting right next to it: a state software system that ignored self-reported noncitizen status for a full year, under an administration before hers, and nearly 400 ineligible people voted as a result.

CNN's Marshall Cohen, in a report picked up by KRDO, put it plainly: Sherrill's disclosure "validates some of Trump's assertions" while also showing that when noncitizens get on the rolls, "it's usually accidental" rather than a coordinated fraud scheme.

What's still unverified

New Jersey has not said whether anyone will face charges for voting while ineligible, even unknowingly. No investigation into individual voters has been announced. No charges have been filed.

It's also unclear whether DHS and New Jersey's Division of Elections are working from the same list, or whether DHS's 35,152 figure includes the 6,600 Sherrill confirmed plus tens of thousands more still unverified. Until DHS releases its underlying data and methodology, that gap between 6,600 and 35,152 remains an open question, not a resolved one.

New Jersey has more than 6.6 million registered voters. Six thousand six hundred improper registrations is a small fraction of that. But it's not nothing, and it's not the first time a state's own systems, not some outside conspiracy, let ineligible people slip onto the rolls.