New Jersey Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill dropped a confession on Tuesday that is going to be really hard to spin at the next "election integrity is a conspiracy theory" fundraiser. As Trending Politics reported, roughly 6,600 noncitizens were wrongly registered to vote in New Jersey before the 2024 election, and fewer than 400 of them actually cast ballots.
The cause? A software error in the state's Motor Vehicle Commission system. People literally pressed "no" on a keypad when asked if they were U.S. citizens, and the system said "cool, registered anyway." That is not a glitch. That is a system doing the exact opposite of its one job. If your smoke detector started fires, you would not call that a minor calibration issue.
The registrations happened between June 2023 and June 2024, which was under former Governor Phil Murphy's watch. Sherrill was quick to point that out, noting she only learned about it last week and immediately ordered an investigation. She also ordered the removal of the erroneously added registrants and started the process of replacing the vendor responsible for the system. So at least someone is getting fired, even if it is a software company and not a human being with decision-making authority.
Sherrill's full statement was a masterclass in trying to be the hero of a story where your team is the villain. She called the failures "reckless" and "appalling," then pivoted to blasting Donald Trump for having "zero credibility on the issue of election integrity." That is certainly one strategy: admitting your state registered thousands of people who told you they were not citizens, then immediately telling the other side they have no room to talk.
"The difference is simple: when we find a problem, we don't hide it, deny it, or invent conspiracies. We investigate it, we fix it, and we tell the public," Sherrill said. Fair enough. Though one might note the problem existed for a full year before anyone noticed, which is less "finding a problem" and more "tripping over a problem that was lying in the middle of the hallway."
The timing is especially rough for Democrats. Trump recently announced that DHS identified at least 278,000 names of noncitizens on voter rolls nationwide, with the actual number expected to be higher because several blue states had resisted cooperating. DHS alleged that as many as 35,152 possible noncitizens could be registered in New Jersey alone. Sherrill's confirmed number of 6,600 is smaller, but it is not exactly zero, which was the number Democrats have been insisting was the real problem for years.
The noncitizens who were registered were scattered across the state and listed as Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters, so this was not some targeted partisan scheme. It was plain old incompetence, which in some ways is worse because at least a scheme implies someone was paying attention.
Republicans have been pushing the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register for federal elections. Democrats have fought it, calling it voter suppression. New Jersey just made that argument significantly harder to sell. When your own state's system registers people who explicitly said they are not citizens, requiring proof of citizenship starts to sound less like suppression and more like common sense.
Sometimes the conspiracy theory is just sitting right there in the voter rolls, wearing a name tag.
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