Emma Wallace The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission disclosed that a vendor software issue between June 2023 and June 2024 resulted in approximately 6,600 people being improperly registered to vote after they indicated during MVC transactions that they were not U.S. citizens. A preliminary state analysis initially found that fewer than 400 of those individuals cast ballots. The state later said approximately 340 of the affected registrants voted. Read on for more about the NJ non-citizen voter registration issue.
The Backstory
Beginning in June 2023, individuals applying for driver’s licenses and identification cards through the MVC were asked whether they were U.S. citizens as part of the agency’s automatic voter registration process. According to both Sherrill and IDEMIA, the 6,600 improperly registered individuals all entered “No” when prompted.
The system continued to ask whether they wanted to register to vote, even with the previous information nullifying their eligibility.
IDEMIA said these individuals then responded with “Yes,” and their information was transmitted to the Division of Elections for voter registration. The Sherrill administration has not concurred with this statement, but said following the citizenship question, these people were registered anyway through “no fault of their own.” Some of the disputed registrants are citizens, while others are not, and much of this is still pending review.
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The problem was corrected in June 2024 when state officials asked IDEMIA to mark responses that claimed non-citizenship as an immediate dismissal from voter registration. The registrations created during the affected period were not comprehensively reviewed and removed at that time.
NJ’s Response
Governor Sherrill said she first discovered the 6,600 improper voter registrations on July 15, 2026, around two years after the issue was fixed. The governor said she immediately ordered her chief counsel to launch an investigation into the error that will be made public when concluded.
The administration has retained an outside firm, CSG Law, to conduct an independent review. The end of the investigation is expected to find out how it happened, who knew about it, and why it was not disclosed.
The state has since placed approximately 5,100 registrations in deleted status after determining they were created solely because of the MVC software error, while another 1,450 registrations were changed to rejected status and referred to county election officials for additional review.
The state separately identified approximately 220 affected individuals who voted but also had previous voter registrations or other attestations indicating their registrations may have been valid. Those records were referred to county officials for additional review.
What is IDEMIA?
IDEMIA is a French technology company that provides identity-related security services, especially in biometrics and cryptography. The company has worked with New Jersey’s MVC for more than 40 years, and its current contract is set to end in January 2027.
It also holds two other contracts with the State Police and state agencies to provide electronic fingerprinting services for background checks and “noncriminal justice purposes.” These similarly end in January 2027.
The Governor said the MVC was already working toward replacing IDEMIA before learning about the voter registration software error. She said the company was a primary cause of long wait times, bureaucracy, and red tape that contributed to the MVC being a “mess.”
While Sherrill has accused IDEMIA of causing the alleged software error, the company has returned the blame to state election officials for not verifying voter registration information. IDEMIA spokesperson Lisa Shoemaker told USA TODAY that the software operated according to the state’s specifications and it is the Division of Elections that is responsible for validating an individual’s eligibility to vote.
“All 6600 individuals indicated ‘Yes’ to wanting to register to vote and ‘No’ to being a U.S. citizen,” Shoemaker told USA TODAY. “This information was recorded correctly and always available to the MVC via the database that MVC utilized to gather voter information and transmit to the Division of Elections. At no point was a noncitizen ever marked as a citizen in the database.”
What’s Next?
Governor Sherrill said preliminary review found that the improper registrants who cast ballots did not alter the results of any election. These voters were scattered across the state, representing Republicans, Democrats, and mostly unaffiliated. The state has not publicly identified which specific elections each of the approximately 340 ballots was cast in.
While it is illegal and a punishable offense for noncitizens to vote in federal and state elections, Governor Sherrill has said the state does not intend to punish people simply for being registered as a result of the government’s error. She has said the administration had not found evidence that the affected individuals deliberately sought to exploit the registration problem.
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Response from Legislators
New Jersey Republicans have also called for additional investigations. All 21 Republican county chairs requested an independent investigation into the voter registration error, including the ability to obtain documents, electronic records, and testimony from government officials, election officials, contractors, and vendors.
Assembly Republicans separately asked Speaker Craig Coughlin to create a bipartisan Special Legislative Committee on Election Integrity with subpoena power. The lawmakers requested testimony from former MVC officials, representatives of IDEMIA, former Secretary of State Tahesha Way, and current Secretary of State Dale Caldwell.
The issue has also reached federal scrutiny from congressional republicans. 19 Republican members of Congress signed a letter to Governor Sherrill expressing concern over the integrity of New Jersey’s election system and requesting a response to 12 questions they included in the letter.
Among these questions were which elections were affected by the error and whether her administration will cooperate fully with the federal government. The letter asked for a response by August 21.
Governor Sherrill responded on August 21, saying her administration had already disclosed the issue, was removing affected registrations, and had launched an independent investigation.
On September 15, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight held a hearing titled “Restoring Election Integrity: Oversight of Voter Fraud in New Jersey,” examining the MVC registration error and broader questions about the state’s voter-registration procedures. Justin Riemer, President and Chief Executive Officer of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, testified that “New Jersey’s automatic registration system could not stop noncitizens who said they were noncitizens, and no
state law required officials to look for them.” He went on to say that, “Federal law offers no help. It prohibits noncitizens from voting but gives states few tools to enforce that prohibition, and in some respects discourages them from removing noncitizens who are already registered. ”
New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew (R, NJ-2) is a member of the committee and focused his comments on the fact that while the errors were observed in 2024, nothing was shared publicly until 2026. “The part that should make every person in New Jersey angry is that the state knew there was a problem in June of 2024 and did not tell the public what happened until two years later,” said Congressman Van Drew.
The state investigation remains ongoing, while county election officials and federal lawmakers continue reviewing the circumstances surrounding the registrations.
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