New Jersey Confirms 6,600 Noncitizens Were Registered to Vote by MVC Software Error, About 400 Cast Ballots

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill confirmed Tuesday that a software glitch at the state's Motor Vehicle Commission improperly registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote starting in June 2023, according to WHYY News. Fewer than 400 of them actually cast ballots in elections between 2023 and 2024.

New Jersey has automatic voter registration tied to MVC transactions since 2018. When people applied for a driver's license or ID, they were asked if they wanted to register to vote. Some people told the MVC they weren't citizens and weren't eligible. The software registered them anyway.

Sherrill said she learned about the error last week, more than a year after it was reportedly fixed in June 2024, and ordered an investigation immediately. The glitch happened under her predecessor, Gov. Phil Murphy. Sherrill didn't hold back on that point.

"It's unacceptable that the MVC took a year to get this issue fixed, and it's unacceptable that no one in the previous administration brought this to light, demanded accountability, or took action when it happened years ago," Sherrill said, according to WHYY.

Sherrill said the state is now sending letters to everyone affected and working to strip anyone improperly registered from the voter rolls. She said the erroneous registrations landed across party lines. Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters all appeared in the registrations, with most falling into the unaffiliated category.

A vendor shipped software that registered people who explicitly said they weren't eligible, and it sat broken for roughly a year under the Murphy administration before anyone fixed it. New Jersey taxpayers and voters deserve to know why that took so long, and Sherrill's investigation needs to answer it.

The White House Pounces

Within hours, the White House put out a statement calling it a "Democrat 'Glitch'" and using it to demand Congress pass the SAVE America Act, which would require states to verify citizenship through DHS's SAVE system before registering federal voters and would mandate voter ID nationwide.

Voter ID and citizenship verification aren't fringe positions. IDs are already required to buy alcohol, board a plane, or open a bank account, and polling consistently shows most Americans support ID requirements at the ballot box. That's a legitimate policy argument regardless of what happened in New Jersey.

But President Trump didn't stop at policy. He posted on Truth Social that "35,152 is the new number just released by Homeland Security of non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey," claiming the real number is "many times" higher and that the noncitizens are "all Dumocrats." That claim traces back to a DHS letter, and according to the Guardian's review of that correspondence, DHS itself expressed less certainty about the figure and never explained its methodology. New Jersey's own confirmed number is 6,600, not 35,152, and Sherrill said the registrations split across parties, not uniformly Democrat.

What the Numbers Actually Show

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told the Guardian the 6,600 figure is a "minuscule fraction" of New Jersey's more than 6.6 million active registered voters as of 2024. Fewer than 400 ballots cast represents a similarly tiny slice of turnout in a state with millions of voters.

Stephen Richer, a Republican who ran elections in Maricopa County, Arizona from 2021 to 2025, told the Guardian the incident isn't nothing but also isn't proof of the widespread fraud Trump and his allies allege. "These people were trying to do the right thing and acknowledge that they're not citizens, and then the vast majority of them, even though registered and presumably were sent election mail materials, ignored that and didn't vote," Richer said.

The glitch is a genuine government failure that deserves scrutiny and Sherrill is right to call it out. But turning 400 stray ballots into evidence of a 278,000-person noncitizen voting scheme, the number Trump cited from DHS in a prior speech, isn't supported by what New Jersey's own investigation has found.

Sherrill used her own press conference to go after Trump directly, saying he has "zero credibility" on election integrity given his history of disputing legitimate results, according to WHYY. That's a political jab, not a fact check of the SAVE Act itself, and it doesn't settle whether states should adopt tougher citizenship verification.

What's Unresolved

New Jersey hasn't said how many of the roughly 6,600 improperly registered noncitizens have been removed from the rolls so far, or how long the state's cleanup will take. Sherrill also hasn't detailed what "guardrails" her administration plans to put in place to prevent a repeat, only that she's "working" on it. The SAVE America Act remains stalled in Congress, and this episode is now Exhibit A for both sides of that fight.