Oh, this is rich. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill stood at a podium and blamed a "software glitch" for registering over 6,600 non-citizens to vote. The software company then essentially said, "Nah, that's not how this went down." As Trending Politics reported, the vendor is pushing back hard, saying the state's own leadership greenlit these registrations.
Here's the beautiful timeline. Sherrill held a press conference on Tuesday where she revealed that approximately 6,600 people who specifically answered "no" when asked if they were U.S. citizens got registered to vote anyway. This happened between June 2023 and June 2024, during the process of applying for driver's licenses and ID cards at the Motor Vehicle Commission. The governor blamed it all on a technology malfunction and said it occurred nearly three years before she took office.
Sherrill also mentioned that a preliminary review found fewer than 400 of those individuals actually cast ballots. She announced the state would scrub their names from voter rolls, hired an outside group to investigate, and started the process of dumping the vendor responsible for the system. Classic politician move: something goes wrong, fire the contractor.
But then the contractor fired back, and things got spicy. French tech company IDEMIA, the vendor in question, released a statement essentially saying, "We did exactly what you told us to do." A spokesperson declared that all 6,600 records contained accurate information based on the design specifications the state itself provided. Every single one of those individuals indicated "yes" to wanting to register and "no" to being a citizen. At no point was anyone incorrectly labeled as a citizen in the database.
IDEMIA also pointed out something rather inconvenient for the governor. The company doesn't manage voter enrollment at all. Their job is simply collecting self-reported data. So the real question becomes: when the Division of Elections received records missing required information like party affiliation, why did they approve adding these people to voter rolls anyway? That's a question directed squarely at the state, not the software.
Naturally, the federal government got involved faster than you can say "election integrity." The U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division launched a formal investigation. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon called the situation "unacceptable and illegal" and said her division is investigating the "unlawful dilution of American votes."
So let's recap this beautiful mess. People literally told the system they weren't citizens. The system recorded that fact correctly. And somehow they still ended up registered to vote. The governor calls it a glitch. The software company calls it working as designed, by the state's own specifications. And now federal investigators are picking through the wreckage.
If your definition of a "glitch" includes state officials apparently waving through voter registrations that were missing basic required information from people who explicitly said they weren't eligible, then sure, glitch it is. The rest of us might call that something a little different.
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