WASHINGTON — Rep. Jeff Van Drew wanted to talk about the New Jersey voting glitch that led to thousands of noncitizens being registered to vote. Democrats at Tuesday’s subcommittee had other ideas.
Van Drew, chair of the House Judiciary oversight subcommittee, sought to highlight the glitch where 6,600 noncitizens were mistakenly registered from June 2023 to June 2024. Fewer than 400 voted.
But committee Democrats tried to turn the focus to President Donald Trump and his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, his pledge during last week’s midterm convention to give $5,000 to every American adult if he was re-elected, the Iran war and a myriad of other issues.
“Well, frankly, there were a lot of people on the other side that were digressing into a myriad of other issues, and we can discuss those issues, and we can argue those issues, and we can debate those issues,” Van Drew, R-Dennis, said after the hearing.
“This is about the fact that in ‘24, ‘25 and ‘26 in the state of New Jersey people were voting illegally. They knew since ‘24, didn’t do anything, and finally in 2026, they were taken off the books. That’s the bottom line.”
The glitch, blamed by Gov. Mikie Sherrill on a software error at the state Motor Vehicles Commission, involved .1% of the state’s registration list and .009% of the total votes in the 2024 election.
One witness, election lawyer Jason Sena, said that the MVC doesn’t register voters but passes the information to the officials who do.
“Even if an error in the MVC software resulted in non-citizens’ information being transmitted to the Division of Elections, the duty to determine eligibility rests with election officials,” Sena said. “Since non-citizens indisputably ended up on the voter rolls, we know that the legally required verification of the information provided by the registrants did not properly occur.”
Van Drew said that several municipal elections in New Jersey were only decided by a handful of votes. “The bottom line is people may not be serving in an elected office because of somebody who voted illegally,” he said.
“There’s a lot of close elections,” he said. “It’s not unusual. What we don’t know, and we’ve requested, but did not receive any documentation of, is where these illegal votes were cast. What elections? What districts? What cities? What towns? You don’t know. Again, that’s the real issue.”
He said he would be meeting with House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to discuss next steps, which could include subpoenas.
“The information that we’ve gotten so far from the governor’s office has been useless,” Van Drew said.
Republicans have cited the voting glitch as an argument for passing the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register and require a specific voter ID to cast a ballot.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law has said as many as 21.3 million U.S. citizens couldn’t quickly get their hands on the required documents, including 3.8 million whose papers were lost, stolen or destroyed.
The bill has passed the House several times but has been blocked in the Senate.
At the hearing, Josh Findlay, senior fellow for election integrity policy at the America First Policy Institute, said the SAVE America Act would have prevented noncitizens from voting in New Jersey.
“The answer to the problem is not to remove names after they appear on voter lists, but rather to prevent improper registrations from occurring in the first place,” said Findlay, whose research group was started by former Trump aides.
But Steven Richter, a Republican and former elected recorder of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, said that his state, which has a citizenship requirement for voter registration, had a glitch similar to New Jersey’s.
The problem in the Garden State was “the result not of attempted fraud but a software problem, caused by imperfect human beings,” he said.
Independent studies have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare. The Brennan Center, for example, reported that just 30 of 23.5 million votes overseen by election officials in the 2016 elections might have been cast by noncitizens. That’s 0.0001%.
“All evidence suggests that noncitizens voting in American elections is a minute phenomenon,” said Richter, who lost a Republican primary for re-election in 2024 by a candidate backed by those who claimed fraud. “Those who allege widespread noncitizen voting have little support for their position.’
Sherrill spokesman Darwin Pham called the hearing “political theater.”
“While Republicans in D.C. continue to weaponize this issue to advance Trump’s voter suppression agenda and showboat for their 15 seconds of fame on Fox News, Governor Sherrill is focused on continuing to solve the problem she inherited from the previous administration,” Pham said. “This is political theater led by a man who hired a campaign operative convicted of voter fraud, bribery, and blackmail, and who has absolutely no credibility to talk about election integrity.”
And the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland said Sherrill deserved praise.
“Governor Sherrill is showing how real leaders take responsibility for the mistakes of government,” Raskin said.
