Overview
- State officials disclosed that about 6,600 people who self‑identified as noncitizens were mistakenly added to New Jersey’s voter rolls through the Motor Vehicle Commission automatic‑registration process and said roughly 400 of those individuals cast ballots.
- Governor Mikie Sherrill formally refused a Justice Department request for names, birth dates, addresses and voting records, citing federal and state privacy laws including the Privacy Act and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act.
- New Jersey has already begun removing roughly 4,500 of the flagged registrations and referred about 2,100 cases to county election officials for case‑by‑case review to avoid wrongfully disenfranchising eligible voters.
- The DOJ has opened a civil‑rights inquiry and said it will seek the records by legal means, but a U.S. district judge recently dismissed the administration’s separate suit to compel New Jersey’s unredacted voter file, a ruling that follows many similar district court losses for the department.
- Key facts remain disputed: the contracted vendor IDEMIA denies an intrinsic software defect, the Department of Homeland Security circulated a larger noncitizen‑match figure that state officials question, and the episode has sharpened partisan calls for federal oversight and proof‑of‑citizenship proposals ahead of the 2026 midterms.