New Jersey discloses 6,600 non-citizens were on New Jersey voter rolls after motor vehicles software error in 2023 and 2024

A serious software error at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission led to roughly 6,600 non-citizens being erroneously added to the state’s voter rolls between June 2023 and June 2024, beginning nearly three years before Gov. Mikie Sherrill took office.

Fewer than 400 of those individuals ultimately cast ballots, a senior Sherrill administration official told the New Jersey Globe.

While applying for driver’s licenses or identification cards, the 6,600 individuals specifically answered “no” on a keypad when asked whether they were U.S. citizens.  But motor vehicles registered them to vote anyway.

“Through no fault of their own, the system registered them,” Sherrill said in a statement obtained by the New Jersey Globe.

Sherrill will address the issue at a Statehouse press conference at 12:15 PM.

The New Jersey disclosure comes five days after President Donald Trump alleged during a prime-time address that as many as 35,152 non-citizens are registered to vote in New Jersey. Trump claimed that roughly 250,000 non-citizens were registered across New Jersey, California, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

The governor said she became aware of the problem last week and immediately ordered her chief counsel to investigate.

“I also ordered the removal of any residents from our voter rolls who were erroneously added between June 2023 and June 2024,” Sherrill said.  “The new MVC administrator that I appointed has begun the process of replacing the vendor responsible for administering the system.”

That vendor, IDEMIA, is a large digital security and biometric identification company that operates TSA PreCheck enrollment services and provides identification technology to government agencies.

“Our preliminary analysis shows fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted,” Sherrill said. “They were registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state.”

Those registrations have already been removed, but it remains unclear which elections the ballots were cast in or whether they could have affected the outcome of any race.

Substantial responsibility for the extraordinary blunder falls on Latrecia Littles-Floyd, who served as acting MVC chief administrator during the period when the faulty registrations occurred.  Gov. Phil Murphy appointed Littles-Floyd after Sue Fulton left the agency to take a position in the Biden administration.

Littles-Floyd also played a major role in the disenfranchisement of multiple U.S. citizens who were temporarily removed from the voter rolls due to a separate MVC error.  She consistently resisted efforts to correct that problem.

It remains unclear whether Littles-Floyd or senior officials in the Murphy administration knew about the software error.

Sherrill is expected to hold any current MVC employees involved in the failure accountable.

“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,” Sherrill said. “This failure didn’t occur under my watch, but accountability starts now.”

A former federal prosecutor, Sherrill said election integrity is “fundamental to our democracy” and pledged to prevent a similar failure from occurring again.

Sherrill also sharply criticized Trump, accusing him of seeking to “weaponize elections for political gain” and declaring that he has “zero credibility on the issue of election integrity.”

“For more than ten years, he has worked to undermine Americans’ faith in our elections by spreading lies about legitimate election results, attempting to overturn a free and fair election, encouraging an attack on our Capitol when he couldn’t accept the will of the voters, and defunding election security at the federal level,” she said.

Sherrill contrasted her administration’s response with Trump’s approach.

“The difference is simple: when we find a problem, we don’t hide it, deny it, or invent conspiracies,” she said.  “We investigate it, we fix it, and we tell the public. That’s what accountability and good governance look like, and that’s exactly what my administration is doing.”

“New Jerseyans should have confidence that every eligible citizen can vote, every lawful vote will be counted, and every reasonable step will be taken to protect the integrity of our elections,” Sherrill said.  “That’s my responsibility, and it’s one I will never stop fighting to uphold.”

This story was updated at 12:02 PM.