Gov. Mikie Sherrill accused Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) and congressional Republicans of turning a voter-registration error into a political weapon, arguing that her administration moved quickly to correct the problem and investigate how it happened.
Sherrill made the comments in a response to Van Drew and other House Republicans who sent her a July 24 letter seeking answers about the voter-registration controversy.
The governor said the integrity of New Jersey’s elections is a matter of “the utmost seriousness” and emphasized that she publicly disclosed the registration error on July 21, three days before the Republicans’ letter.
“My administration is fully committed to ensuring that elections in New Jersey remain free and fair,” Sherrill wrote.
The controversy involves about 4,600 people who were registered to vote despite having indicated through the state’s motor-vehicle system that they were not U.S. citizens. The state has said the registration problem resulted from a system error that occurred years before Sherrill took office.
Sherrill said her administration has moved aggressively to address the problem and remove affected individuals from the voter rolls.
She also said she ordered an immediate investigation by a bipartisan firm led by Jeffrey Chiesa, a former U.S. Senator and New Jersey Attorney General who served under a Republican governor.
“This work remains my focus,” Sherrill wrote.
The governor then turned her attention to the Republicans who signed Van Drew’s letter, accusing them of being more interested in political gain than protecting election integrity.
“Washington Republicans on the other hand, seem much more concerned with using the issue for political gain than they are with protecting our elections,” Sherrill wrote.
She pointed to several signatories’ support for President Donald Trump and his election-related policies. Sherrill also noted that seven members who signed the letter had voted to challenge electoral votes during the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The governor also rejected the Republicans’ argument that the SAVE America Act would have prevented New Jersey’s registration error.
Sherrill urged the lawmakers to become more familiar with legislation they had cosponsored, arguing that the circumstances surrounding the New Jersey registrations did not support their claim.
As the governor noted, the affected individuals had answered that they were not U.S. citizens. Subsequent investigation, she said, indicates that some of those individuals may nevertheless have had valid registrations.
That distinction is central to Sherrill’s response. Rather than describing the episode simply as a failure to identify noncitizens, she characterized it as a registration-system error that her administration inherited and is now working to correct.
Sherrill also criticized the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which Republicans have promoted as a tool for identifying potentially ineligible voters.
The governor argued that the database has “well-documented accuracy issues” and warned that relying on it to remove voters can disenfranchise eligible citizens.
She cited Texas as an example, saying that the state’s secretary of state acknowledged that the SAVE database had flagged U.S. citizens as potentially ineligible voters.
Sherrill used the issue to make a broader argument against expanding federal control over voter registration.
“Proposals to expand the federal government’s role in voter registration systems, including through a centralized registry of voters, raise important concerns regarding personal privacy and abuses of power,” she wrote.
The governor argued that those concerns are particularly significant under Trump, whom she accused of seeking to limit voting access to people who support him.
Sherrill also invoked the constitutional division of election responsibilities, arguing that the Founding Fathers gave states authority over election administration as a safeguard against federal overreach.
And she took a swipe at Van Drew’s past association with former Atlantic City Council President Craig Callaway, who is currently in federal prison for voter fraud.
one of the signatories to your letter employed an operative convicted of voter fraud, bribery, and blackmail.
The response comes as Van Drew and House Republicans seek detailed information about how the registration error occurred and whether it affected elections.
Van Drew, who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, sent Sherrill 12 questions about the controversy and sought information about the state’s voter-registration systems and the administration’s response.
Sherrill said many of the questions raised by the Republicans have already been answered through public records or information released by her administration.
She promised that the state would continue to report publicly on the investigation and its findings.
“We will continue to approach this issue with transparency, integrity, and accountability,” Sherrill wrote.
The governor closed by promising to protect the personal information of New Jersey voters, maintain the integrity of the state’s voter rolls and ensure that elections remain “free, fair, and secure.”
The exchange sets up a broader political and policy fight over who should oversee voter registration, how New Jersey should respond to the registration error, and whether the federal government should play a greater role in election administration.
New Jersey Republicans are also challenging the administration’s characterization of the problem as limited to the MVC glitch. NJGOP Chairwoman Christine Giordano Hanlon said records obtained from county election officials show possible noncitizens were registered before June 2023 and after June 2024, outside the one-year period identified by the state.
The NJGOP said its review of Hudson County records found that more than half of the documented registrations involving possible noncitizens occurred outside that window.
Hanlon is calling for a statewide audit of the voter rolls and a broader investigation, arguing that the state needs to determine whether the problem extends beyond the MVC software failure.
The administration has identified about 220 possible noncitizens whose registration and voting histories predated the MVC problem, further raising questions about whether the issue can be attributed entirely to the acknowledged glitch.
The MVC mailed notices in English and Spanish to affected residents confirming that they had answered “No” to the citizenship question. The state has maintained that the erroneous registrations occurred through no fault of those residents and has said it will not prosecute someone merely for having been registered improperly.
The documentation could be important for green-card holders and other immigrants concerned that an improper registration could jeopardize a future citizenship application. Sherrill has acknowledged that the Trump administration could pursue noncitizens who cast ballots.
Sherrill’s administration has removed about 5,100 people from New Jersey’s voter rolls after determining they were registered because of a Motor Vehicle Commission software error and had not otherwise attested that they were eligible to vote.
But the review has uncovered a second issue: some U.S. citizens may have accidentally indicated that they were not citizens when applying. That raises the possibility that the registration error may have affected both ineligible and eligible voters.
Another 1,450 registrations have been rejected, meaning those individuals cannot vote while county election officials review their eligibility.
The administration also found that about 340 people who were registered because of the software error later voted.
At the same time, officials identified about 220 people affected by the software error who had older voter registrations or other records indicating they may have been eligible to vote. County election officials are reviewing those cases to make sure eligible voters are not removed from the rolls.
The 220 cases do not necessarily represent another group of noncitizens who voted. Instead, they are people flagged during the state’s review whose other records may show that they were legally registered to vote.
The U.S. Department of Justice sought unredacted New Jersey voter information after the registrations became public. Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters told the New Jersey Globe that noncitizens who voted illegally should be prosecuted.
Last month, U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi dismissed with prejudice a Trump administration lawsuit seeking New Jersey’s complete voter-registration database, including confidential driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Van Drew and two other Republican committee leaders have demanded records from Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell, New Jersey’s secretary of state and chief election officer, and IDEMIA, the identity and security technology company involved in the MVC system.
The lawmakers are seeking communications between IDEMIA and the MVC to reconcile conflicting accounts. Sherrill blamed an IDEMIA software error, while the company said its system accurately recorded both the applicants’ registration requests and their statements that they were not citizens, leaving that information available to the state.
IDEMIA has denied responsibility and blamed the Division of Elections.
The error affected approximately 6,600 people who applied for driver’s licenses or state identification cards between June 2023 and June 2024. Although they answered “No” when asked whether they were U.S. citizens, their information was still transmitted for voter-registration processing without the required attestation of eligibility.
The problem began during Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration, was corrected after one year, and was not disclosed publicly until July 2026. Murphy has said he did not know about it while serving as governor.
The congressional inquiry could lead to hearings and subpoenas.
RELATED ARTICLES
-
November 30, 2018 -
-
December 15, 2019