New Jersey’s former top motor vehicle official told lawmakers in 2019 that verifying voter eligibility was the Secretary of State’s responsibility, not the Motor Vehicle Commission’s, as legislators considered allowing noncitizens, including undocumented immigrants, to obtain driver’s licenses.
“The Secretary of State verifies voters’ eligibility,” said then-MVC administrator B. Sue Fulton. “That’s how we do voter registration in the state of New Jersey.”
Assemblyman Erik Peterson (R-Franklin) questioned Fulton during a December 2019 Assembly Judiciary Committee hearing on legislation expanding access to driver’s licenses. Peterson wanted to know what safeguards would prevent people who were ineligible to vote from being registered when they applied for licenses at MVC offices.
Fulton said MVC employees did not independently verify voter eligibility. She said applicants attested to their qualifications and identified the Secretary of State as responsible for verifying eligibility.
Several years later, approximately 6,600 people who told the MVC they were not U.S. citizens had their information transmitted to the Division of Elections for voter registration. About 340 subsequently voted.
Gov. Mikie Sherrill has blamed IDEMIA, the MVC’s longtime technology contractor, for sending information about those applicants to the statewide voter-registration system even though they had identified themselves as noncitizens.
The administration’s position is that the information should never have reached the Division of Elections in the first place. Under that account, the failure occurred before state election officials received the records: the system should have prevented information from applicants who answered “no” to the citizenship question from being transmitted for voter-registration processing.
IDEMIA has disputed that explanation, maintaining that its system accurately recorded the applicants’ answers, including their statements that they were not U.S. citizens, and made that information available to the state.
Peterson, who pressed on safeguards, is now calling for a bipartisan investigation into what Sherrill and former Gov. Phil Murphy knew about the safeguards protecting the state’s voter rolls.
“The committee was told that the mechanism to prevent ineligible foreign nationals from registering to vote was hoping that the Secretary of State could manually detect and remove them from the voter roll,” he said. “Clearly, the Secretary of State has been unable or unwilling to protect the integrity of our voter registration rolls.”
At the 2019 hearing, Peterson asked Fulton how New Jersey would ensure that applicants who could not legally vote would not be registered.
“How do you propose to prevent, to ensure, um, the citizens of New Jersey that people who aren’t permitted to vote, um, won’t be signed up to vote under this bill?” Peterson asked.
Fulton initially said the MVC’s automatic voter-registration process included verification.
“Part of the automatic voter registration that Motor Vehicle Commission provides at our agencies, um, is a verification of eligibility,” she said. “We do verify eligibility before we can send that record to Division of Elections.”
When Peterson asked who made that determination, Fulton described an electronic signature process through which applicants attested to their qualifications.
“It’s very similar to the paper document that you sign in voter registration,” Fulton said. “You indicate under penalty of perjury, you indicate, um, all of the different ways that you’re eligible.”
Peterson asked whether that meant applicants were verifying their own eligibility rather than having the MVC independently confirm it.
“So self, the individual who’s signing it verifies it? You don’t verify?” he said.
Fulton said individuals attest that they meet the age, citizenship, and other requirements for registering.
“The individual verifies under penalty of perjury,” Fulton said. “They verify that they are at least 17. They verify their U.S. citizen. They verify they are otherwise eligible to vote. That is how we determine eligibility.”
Peterson then asked whether an MVC employee examining an applicant’s identification would prevent a noncitizen from registering. Fulton said it would not since her staff didn’t check.
The Hunterdon County Republican argued that ineligible applicants should be identified before their information reached election officials.
“It would be very simple for the motor vehicle people to flag somebody who’s not eligible to register to vote,” Peterson said. “I would think that would be common sense and to the integrity of our voting system.”
Sherrill’s account similarly places the failure at the point where information was transmitted from the MVC system: applicants had already disclosed that they were not citizens, and their records should not have been forwarded for voter registration.
That is separate from whether MVC employees were responsible for independently investigating an applicant’s citizenship. The administration says the system failed to act on information the applicants themselves had already supplied.
Tahesha Way was secretary of state when Fulton testified and during the June 2023 to June 2024 period when the registration error occurred. Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell now serves as secretary of state.
State officials have moved approximately 5,100 registrations into an ineligible status and referred roughly 1,450 additional cases to county election officials for review. Some individuals may have been U.S. citizens who answered the citizenship question incorrectly.
Peterson accused Sherrill of understating the potential scope of the problem.
“Unfortunately, when confronted with the possibility that hundreds of thousands foreign nationals who got driver’s licenses over the past six years probably registered to vote because there is no safeguards to prevent them from registering,” stated Peterson. “Our governor lied to us and said it was a computer glitch and then shrugged it off as if only a few people wrongly registered.
Peterson did not provide evidence that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens had registered to vote. The state has identified approximately 6,600 affected records.
“There needs to be an immediate bipartisan investigation into what Governors Murphy and Sherrill knew about the purposeful compromising of the integrity of our voter rolls and our elections,” Peterson said. “If the Governor has nothing to hide, she should welcome the investigation.”
No publicly established evidence shows the registration problem was intentional.
“Finally, new safeguards need to be implemented to make it impossible for foreign nationals to register to vote,” Peterson said.