Thousands Of Noncitizens On Jersey’s Voter Rolls Represent Just ‘The Tip Of The Iceberg’
M.D. Kittle
‘Ladies and gentlemen, … that’s called a cover-up,’ said Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-NJ, during a hearing on New Jersey’s dirty voter rolls.
Backed into a political corner, first-term New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill held a press conference earlier this summer to let everyone know that she was on top of a preventable assault on election integrity. The far-left politician posing as a moderate told reporters that she was “appalled by the reckless failures” that opened the door to thousands of noncitizens showing up on the Garden State’s voter rolls. She was equally disgusted by “the lack of transparency shown by those in charge at the time.”
“We have no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed,” Sherrill said.
Nearly two months later, we still don’t know whether that’s true. We still don’t know if the sparse information the Sherrill administration has provided is true. That’s because the Democrat has been less than transparent about a number of things.
“There’s still a lot we don’t know about, why this happened and why it took so long for the public to know about it,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, said this week during a Capitol Hill hearing on New Jersey’s voter registration debacle.
Titled “Restoring Election Integrity: Oversight of Voter Fraud in New Jersey,” the hearing gave Republicans on the subcommittee the chance to shine more light on an issue that Democrats desperately want to keep in the dark, while offering subcommittee Democrats like the ever race-baiting Rep. Jasmine Crockett the opportunity to turn the whole thing into a sideshow on Orange Man Bad. Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, the insufferable blowhard rep. from Maryland, jumped in for his own dose of Trump Derangement Syndrome theater.
In between the grandstanding, election integrity experts testified that the reported noncitizens on New Jersey’s voter rolls are likely just the “tip of the iceberg” in the Garden State — and in a lot of other states. That’s troubling less than 50 days until November’s general election.
‘The Problem is Built into the Process’
In late July, Sherrill held her “it wasn’t me” press conference to confess that some 6,600 noncitizens had landed on New Jersey’s voter rolls in 2023 and 2024 — and about 400 went on to vote. She has since amended the numbers, asserting that only about 340 of the 6,600 “accidentally” registered noncitizens voted. The state has removed and placed approximately 5,100 of the wrongly registered in “deleted status,” the governor said. Another 1,450 or so have had their registration status changed to rejected, pending further review.
Sherill blames the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission’s longtime license printing vendor for what she has described as a software glitch. A spokeswoman for the firm, IDEMIA, which has contracts with several New Jersey agencies as well as the federal government, has said “there was no glitch or software error,” and the problem was not on the vendor’s end.
Van Drew said the company has been cooperating with his subcommittee’s investigation; Sherrill and her administration have not.
Josh Findlay, senior fellow for secure elections policy at the America First Policy Institute, told the subcommittee that in some cases registering noncitizens to vote may have been a feature of the system, not a glitch.
“In New Jersey, the problem is built into the process,” Findlay said.
Election fraud, Findlay and others said, is a likely outcome of states like New Jersey that automatically register voters through their motor vehicle division, which also hands out driver’s license to illegal aliens.
‘The Problem is Bigger’
In May 2021, the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission extended standard driver’s licenses and non-drive ID cards to noncitizens. The blue state’s Democrat-dominated legislature passed the bill, which was signed in December 2019 by then Gov. Phil Murphy, another far-left Democrat. The law opened license and ID access to more than 450,000 illegal aliens of driving age, the MVC estimated.
“Increased access to a driver license will do much to improve the lives of many New Jersey residents and enhance public safety,” MVC Chief Administrator Sue Fulton said at the time. “Our roads are safer when drivers are trained, tested, licensed, and insured.”
Fulton also assured a legislative committee that noncitizens would not be able to register to vote. She was wrong.
“The problem is much broader than the state admits,” Jason Sena, a New Jersey election law attorney, told the Judiciary oversight subcommittee.
Even if Sherrill is right about the vendor software error, Sena said the problem isn’t limited to the alleged “glitch.” He said public records show that election offices in Hudson and Bergen counties, two of New Jersey’s most densely populated counties, confirmed that noncitizens registered to vote before and after the timeframe in question — between June 2023 and June 2024.
“Records show noncitizens were permitted to register to vote outside that timeframe and through other nonMVC methods, which confirms as a matter of fact that the problem is bigger than state has admitted,” Sena told the subcommittee.
Justin Riemer, president of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), testified that New Jersey did not design its automatic registration system to actually verify citizenship. The applicants were registered to vote even after they acknowledged that they were not citizens on the Motor Vehicle Commission form. The front end of the system, he told the subcommittee, relies solely on attestation of citizenship without any further verification.
The Garden State is by no means alone. Checking ‘yes’ on a box is all that stands between election integrity and diluting citizen votes in federal elections.
“New Jersey may be just the tip of the iceberg on this issue,” Findlay said of noncitizens showing up on the voter rolls in states that grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.