New Jersey has begun the process of ousting from its voter rolls 4,500 people who managed to register despite being ineligible noncitizens, Gov. Mikie Sherrill said Tuesday.
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Last week, Ms. Sherrill revealed that some 6,600 names ended up registered to vote despite being noncitizens.
She said the system discovered 1,100 of those may actually be eligible citizens. Officials are now double-checking to see if those names should stay.
“Just as we have an obligation to remove everyone who is not eligible to vote, we also have a responsibility to protect the voting rights of eligible New Jersey citizens and ensure no one is improperly removed from the rolls. And we are going to do just that,” the Democratic governor said.
Noncitizens who showed up at the state’s motor vehicle office from June 2023 to June 2024 were prodded to register to vote.
Even if they indicated they weren’t citizens and were ineligible, their names were still added to the registry, Ms. Sherrill said.
The governor said “fewer than 400” of the people have actually voted.
The state seems confident that 4,500 of the names are definitely ineligible. The other 1,100 are going through a secondary review by county officials.
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Ms. Sherrill said that tracks with the experience in other states, where names have been flagged as ineligible, only to emerge that they were in fact legitimate voters.
The governor blamed a “serious software error” for the problem, adding that the noncitizens were registered “through no fault of their own.”
IDEMIA, the vendor that sold the state the software, said the fault lay with New Jersey.
“The voter registration information is transmitted to the New Jersey Department of State, Division of Elections, which is ultimately responsible for verifying eligibility to vote. Information submitted by IDEMIA must still be validated and adjudicated by the Division of Elections,” the company said.
The governor’s revelation last week was a bombshell, coming just days after President Trump warned that noncitizens ended up on states’ voter rolls — and singled New Jersey out as one of the offenders.
Republicans said New Jersey was proof that the president was right.
Ms. Sherrill on Tuesday decried that criticism, saying the GOP was trying to “weaponize” the state’s failure. She said Republicans’ goal was “voter suppression.”
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